October 10, 2003 - 9 dead Iraqis and 40 wounded at a Baghdad police station; a Spanish diplomat shot down outside of his home; 3 US Soldiers killed in two separate ambushes – one in Baqouba and the other in Baghdad’s Sadr City – and that is just the product of 24 hours of life in Occupied Iraq. The victims of the attacks are what Paul Bremer calls “bumps in the road” and the President calls “great progress” as he campaigns to get public support for borrowing yet another $87 Billion to pay for his un planned Iraqi guerilla war.
Meanwhile, in America’s other war – the ignores and forgotten war in Afghanistan it is revealed that a detachment of well armed Taliban fighters attacked and defeated the Afghan police in the Village of Barmal near the US Base at Shkin. 8 Afghan police were killed and the remaining 5 skedaddled after a 5 hour battle. The Taliban held control of the village for more than a month, according to Chicago Tribune writer Vanessa Gezari who interviewed the Barmal police commander. More “bumps in the road” demonstrating that the writ of the Karzai government is largely restricted to Kabul and there it runs only tentatively.

Television news shows us occasional images of the devastation wrought by America’s Afghani blitzkrieg two years ago contrasted by scenes of work on the new and modernized Kabul to Kandahar highway as an illustration of the “great progress” that the Bush team has achieved in that country. The importance of that project cannot be understated. When it is finished Afghanistan will have a modern highway linking the Capitol to the center of the Taliban’s influence – a highway that runs through territory that neither Kabul nor the peacemakers control.

We forgot Afghanistan as we rushed off to enter the race for Baghdad and left the job of bringing Osama Bin Laden and the one-eyed mullah to bay. They were marginalized the Administration told us. Well they seem to be creeping back in from the margins and doing so with an effectiveness that is forcing western aid workers to withdraw fron areas that they are contesting. The Soviets saw the same thing during their inning of the Great Game. We have ignored the lesson they were taught by the very forces we trained and equipped the same ones that afflict us and our friends today.

The lesson has not been lost on the Iraqi resistance. Each day that they grow stronger and each time they inflict more casualties the willingness of ordinary Iraqis to cooperate with the occupation wanes out of a combination of nationalist feeling and fear. In the short term the resistance is not counting on forcing the US to cut and run, What they are depending on is the reality that the Bush Administration is unwilling to take the politically risky steps of bringing its garrison up to a strength that can pacify the country and asking for the financial sacrifice to pay for it.

Good Progress? Tell that to the bumps in the road.