First, let me thank everyone for their comments on my posts from yesterday. Personal attacks aside, I actually agreed with a significant percentage of what people wrote. I hope people will stick around the site to see what else we have to say. In more case than not, we're on the same side here. Ok, on to today's blogging.

I'm a bit surprised that this story in Sunday's NYT about the failed U.S. war in Afghanistan didn't get more attention. I won't try to summarize the tale of missteps by the Bush Administration, although suffice to say it's as depressing as you might imagine.

At critical moments in the fight for Afghanistan, the Bush administration diverted scarce intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq, including elite C.I.A. teams and Special Forces units involved in the search for terrorists. As sophisticated Predator drone spy planes rolled off assembly lines in the United States, they were shipped to Iraq, undercutting the search for Taliban and terrorist leaders, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

None of this should be terribly surprising. It was obvious 5 years ago that for its talk about democracy and stability in Afghanistan, they didn't really have the stomach to do the tough sort of nation-building necessary to stop the country from falling back into turmoil. The Administration's fixation on Saddam caused them to lose sight of a real potential for foreign policy success in Afghanistan. Imagine how much better off America would be today if that nation was on the path toward democracy. It's rather amazing in one respect. We dropped the ball on winning a smaller war in Afghanistan so that we could lose a much bigger and costlier war in Iraq. One line in particular, however, jumped out at me: