Bush's blunders

Afghanistan:

THE bloodshed in Afghanistan has reached levels not seen since the 2001 invasion as anger at bungling by an ineffective Government in Kabul and its foreign backers stokes support for the Taliban and other extremist groups.

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"This place can only go up or down, and it's going down fast, which is something the international community simply will not understand," said a security analyst who has been working in and out of Afghanistan for 30 years.

Almost six years after the hardline Islamist Taliban were ousted, their insurgency is gaining strength, fuelled by resentment at NATO bombing of civilians, billions of dollars of wasted aid, a lack of jobs and record crops of opium, the raw material for heroin.

The fighting is spreading to places once relatively safe, including the capital and the western and northern parts of the country.

"This is a guerilla movement but it does seem to have a real momentum behind it at the moment," said Joanna Nathan, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank headed by former foreign minister Gareth Evans.

In Kabul, where suicide bombs have killed almost 50 people in two weeks, foreigners are increasingly ordered into "lockdown" -- barred by employers from leaving their heavily protected compounds, often behind armed guards, razor wire and concrete blast walls.

"It's all now too close -- people are jumpy," said a UN official who has lived in the dusty, chaotic city ringed by mountains for four years.

The revitalised Taliban have switched tactics back to traditional guerilla warfare after attempts to take on foreign troops under separate NATO and US commands in pitched battles last year resulted in heavy casualties.

"They never evaporated into thin air. The Taliban were there, they have been there and they are here now," said government adviser and former minister Hamidullah Tarzi, carrying his trademark silver pistol.

Iraq:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 — In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration’s handling of the war “incompetent” and said the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight.”

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who retired in 2006 after being replaced in Iraq after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, blamed the Bush administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current addition of American forces as a “desperate” move that would not achieve long-term stability.

“After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” General Sanchez said at a gathering of military reporters and editors in Arlington, Va.

He is the most senior war commander of a string of retired officers who have harshly criticized the administration’s conduct of the war. While much of the previous condemnation has been focused on the role of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, General Sanchez’s was an unusually broad attack on the overall course of the war.

Just what HAS Bush done that hasn't broken, collapsed, disintegrated, blown up, or run away?