It's a longish piece, but well worth the read - especially if your blood pressure was running a little low this morning.
The excerpt that lots of people will use in posting their links:
It was clear, very soon after September 11th, who had organized the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and WTC. In this situation, you've got roughly 3 choices:1) Do nothing. While such a move would certainly give you the advantage of surprise, it wouldn't gain you very much, and it would be politically impossible;
2) Have Osama & his compatriots handed over for trial. The ideal solution - utterly deflating on every front for al Qaeda. "Betrayed" by your Taliban allies, exposed to worldwide condemnation and ridicule, paraded around in silly outfits, and, most importantly, prevented from doing further harm. Was this ever possible? Maybe, yes - the Taliban leadership was intransigent (refusing to even talk to non-Muslims), but there seemed to be some tension here between Mullah Omar and the clerical council, maybe enough to work something out or effect a coup. We'll never know;
3) Go and get him. Not the best outcome, and not a sure thing. For one thing you've got to bomb and shoot people, and they tend to react badly to that sort of the thing. But, on the other hand, you do get to bomb and shoot the actual terrorists who killed 3,000 people in the heart of New York City, which is a very desirable strategic and cathartic outcome. But if you do this, you've got to do it right. You've got to commit, and you've got to follow through. You can't fuck the dog.
It's weird to compare the Summer of War to that immediate post-9/11 political environment. The country was a lot more unified, for one thing, and there was a more universal tendency to trust in the President to do the right thing (it was, after all, his job). But, perhaps for these reasons, it seemed like there was a lot more space to disagree - to point out how misplaced this trust was - than there would be later on. (Example.) It was right in the middle of the Afghanistan operation, remember, that future Bush supplicant John McCain would go to the editorial pages of the reverently Bushite Wall Street Journal and publish a piece - in a time of war, no less! - the plain subtext of which was that the President was blowing it. He was relying too much on proxies. He was too timid. He was risking defeat.
But a few weeks later Kabul fell, and that was that. We won! Dubya is so our Henry V, huzzah! and huzzah!, and let the celebration and I-told-you-so's begin! And we did win, right? The Taliban are defeated, Afghanistan is free, Osama is on the run, and all's well.
Except we didn't really win. We had overlapping policy objectives in Afghanistan, but the primary purpose was to capture or kill as much of al Qaeda as possible, and render them impotent. This was not done. Knocking off the Taliban was nice, as they weren't very nice and they weren't our friends, but now you're stuck holding Afghanistan, and who wants fucking Afghanistan? Al Qaeda is inconvenienced, which is fine, but they are not beaten. We fret now about "losing Afghanistan" but when we failed to capture and/or kill Osama and most of his forces, we failed in our overriding strategic objective. But the optics were good. It looked like victory. Good enough.
And I'm not sure what happened next.
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