“Taliban Move Toward Kabul.” That was the headline of the lead story on the front page of The Christian Science Monitor’s July 24th, 2007 edition www.csmonitor.com. At least someone is paying attention to what is happening in Afghanistan these days, and what’s happening is that while President George W. Bush doubles down on his surge in Iraq, the insurgency in Afghanistan has been flowing out of the no-man’s land on the Pakistani border like the recent flood waters in Britain and into the countryside. Coupling increasing numbers of suicide bombings in the north of the country with a rash of kidnappings in the south (60 since April,) the Taliban appears to be aiming to encircle the capitol, to isolate the city from the rest of the country. It was a tactic successfully employed against the Soviet occupation in the 1980’s.

    While President George W. Bush keeps repeating his resolve to “win” in Iraq, he has apparently decided to unwin in Afghanistan. It’s time to put the situation into terms with which he and his administration are familiar.

    Although he is no longer wandering the halls of the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld’s many words of wisdom that defined the administration’s War on Terror is apropos here. He famously said during a NATO news briefing in Brussels in 2002: “There are known knowns. These are things that we know we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are some things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

    So with Rumsfeld as our guide, the man who also said “Freedom’s untidy,” herewith an observation of conditions as they are in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    First of all, according to Bush, Iraq is winnable. He says he knows it’s winnable because winning is the only option. Nothing succeeds like success, and in Iraq, Bush says success is “not no violence.” The president says we can’t talk about not winning in Iraq. In other words we can’t talk about losing. Bush says that is not an option. It’s not clear if he means simply employing the word “losing” is not an option, which means we can only use the term unwinnable, or that the option not acceptable is not losing the war, thereby winning the unwinnable.

    The problem is, that while we have not been winning the unwinnable, we’ve been unwinning that which was won, in other words, the winnable war in Afghanistan. Unlike Iraq, we were able to not only win against the Taliban and whatever al Qaeda elements were there by chasing them into the wilds of Tora Bora (including Osama himself), we were also able to win hearts and minds, which is known in the military as “Phase 4” of a conflict. Unfortunately, while we were focusing on hearts and minds, we forgot about their stomachs. Bush should have known better because he once said “I know how hard it is to put food on your family.”

    So, the industrious Afghani farmers tilled the soil and produced the cash crop they’ve come to rely upon for years, which had been eradicated by the Taliban incidentally. Poppy fields…hectares upon hectares of opium poppy fields. Since the invasion of Afghanistan just after 9/11, with the Taliban driven out and Bush in control, opium poppy production has been ramped up higher than it ever was before.

    In the year 2006, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime www.unodc.org, opium poppy production hit an all-time high, a 26% increase or 5,644 metric tons from just the year before, when the previous all-time high was recorded. Not only that, but the number of opium poppy farms grew by an astonishing 61% in that one year alone. Afghan President, Hamid Karzai was quoted in the Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com as saying: “once we thought terrorism was Afghanistan’s biggest enemy, (but) poppy, its cultivation and drugs are Afghanistan’s major enemy.” His country is now the source of roughly 90% of the world’s known heroin supply.

    It provides some practical proof of the Arthur Laffer “supply-side economics” theory, also known as “Reaganomics.” The huge increase in Afghani heroin has made it easier and cheaper to acquire, and it has or is supplanting cocaine as the drug of choice. (It might be instructive to note that Noble Laureate monetarist, Milton Friedman, another darling of the laissez-faire economics right, thought controlled substance use should be decriminalized, an heretical notion for any conservative.)

    Now a cynic might conclude from all this that George W. Bush facilitated this illegal activity by trying to win the unwinnable in Iraq and unwinning the win he had in Afghanistan. A nasty cynic might judge him as some sort of de facto or proxy drug lord since this all happened on his watch. I’m a cynic, but not a nasty one.

    Anyway, back to the situation in Iraq. There is a way out of this. Bush, who is getting more and more pressure from not only democrats, but members of his own party to withdraw, should perhaps employ the thinking of a Korean War hero, US Marine General Oliver P. Smith. At the battle of Chosin Reservoir in 1950, General Smith, in reaction to the suggestion that his forces were retreating from an enemy encirclement, is said to have replied: “Retreat, Hell! We're advancing in the other direction!” In other words, we could simply advance out of Iraq. The unwinnable could be snatched from the jaws of defeat.

    Bush could even lean on his own words if he likes. During one of his carefully choreographed speeches to a hand-picked audience in Greeley, Colorado on November 4th, 2006, Bush said: “The only way we can win is to leave before the job is done.”

    For George W. Bush right now, it’s an unwinnable-unwinnable situation.

    John Wydra