Afghanistan unliberated.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Comment - Column

George Bush likes to view himself as the Great Liberator, and he has said many times that he's freed fifty million people: the combined populations of Iraq and Afghanistan. But Iraq is going to hell, with 100 civilian deaths a day due to the civil war--oh, I'm sorry, I mean the sectarian violence. Afghanistan is headed down the same road.

"The government and its international partners remained incapable of providing security to the people of Afghanistan," says Amnesty International in its annual report. "Absence of rule of law, and a barely functional criminal justice system, left many victims of human rights violations, especially women, without redress. Over 1,000 civilians were killed in attacks by U.S. and Coalition forces and by armed groups. U.S. forces continued to carry out arbitrary arrests and indefinite detentions."

Much of the country is in disarray. Corruption runs wild. Warlords, including some of the same individuals who brutalized the populace before the Taliban took over, now exercise power in many provinces. There are even warlords in the cabinet of Hamid Karzai.

And, five years after its defeat, the Taliban has regrouped in the south, carrying out ever more brazen attacks on U.S. and NATO forces.

Suicide bombings are dramatically on the rise. "There have been forty suicide bombings during the past nine months, compared to five in the preceding five years," Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Jihad, noted in the June 22 issue of The New York Review of Books.

On September 8, the Taliban conducted a suicide car bombing outside the U.S. embassy in Kabul. That attack killed at least sixteen people, including two U.S. soldiers. Two days later, a suicide bomber killed a provincial governor who was a Karzai friend.

For the people of Afghanistan, life remains grim. The United Nations Development Program ranks Afghanistan near the very bottom: 173 out of 178 countries in terms of health, life expectancy, and other indicators.

Especially for girls and women, conditions are deteriorating. "Violence against women and girls remains rampant," Human Rights Watch reports. "Women and girls continue to confront tight restrictions on their mobility, and many are not free to travel without a male relative and a burqa."

Their education is also under assault.

"Brutal attacks by armed opposition groups on Afghan teachers, students, and their schools have occurred throughout much of Afghanistan in recent months," Human Rights Watch reports, with...