Missteps, diverted resources played role in Taliban's comeback

NEW YORK -- A year after the Taliban fell to an American-led coalition, a group of NATO ambassadors landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, to survey what appeared to be a triumph -- a fresh start for a country ripped apart by years of war with the Soviets and brutal repression by religious extremists.

With a senior American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, leading the way, they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters, with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders. At a briefing from the US Central Command, they were told that the Taliban were now a "spent force."

"Some of us were saying, 'Not so fast,' " Burns, now the undersecretary of state for political affairs, recalled. "A number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear."

But that skepticism never took hold in Washington. Assessments by the CIA circulating at the same time reported that the Taliban no longer posed a threat, according to two senior intelligence officials.

The American sense of victory was so robust that the top CIA specialists and elite special forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan were packing their guns and preparing for the next war, in Iraq.

Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions that helped send what many in the American military call "the good war" off course.

Like Osama bin Laden and his deputies, the Taliban had found refuge in Pakistan and regrouped as the American focus wavered. Taliban fighters seeped back over the border, driving up the suicide attacks and roadside bombings by as much as 25 percent this spring, and forcing NATO and American troops into battles to retake previously liberated villages in southern Afghanistan.

NATO and US forces have scored some successes recently, and since the 2001 invasion, there have been improvements in healthcare and education, as well as the quality of life in the cities. But Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, said in Washington recently that security in his country had "definitely deteriorated."

One former national security official called that "a very diplomatic understatement."

President Bush's critics have long contended that the Iraq war has diminished America's effort in Afghanistan, which the administration has denied, but an examination of how the policy unfolded within the administration reveals a deep divide over how to proceed in Afghanistan and a series of decisions that at times seemed to relegate it to an afterthought as Iraq unraveled.

Statements from the White House in support of Afghanistan were resolute, but behind them was a halting, sometimes reluctant commitment to solving Afghanistan's myriad problems, according to dozens of interviews in the United States, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, and in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

At critical moments in the fight for Afghanistan, the Bush administration diverted scarce intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq. As 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 military and intelligence officials.

As defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld took credit for toppling the Taliban with light, fast forces. But he failed to anticipate the need for more forces after the old government was gone, and blocked an early proposal for a large international force.

When it came to reconstruction, big goals were announced, big projects identified. Yet in the year Bush promised a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan, the country received less assistance per capita than did post-conflict Bosnia and Kosovo, according to a study by the Rand Corporation.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the administration's policy, saying, "I don't buy the argument that Afghanistan was starved of resources." Yet she said: "I don't think the US government had what it needed for reconstructing a country. We did it ad hoc in the Balkans, and then in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq."