(Washington, DC) - Well, Mr. Chairman, they’re back!  The Taliban that is.  The terrorists, the mid-wives of the September 11 attacks, the protectors of Osama bin Laden.  I guess they didn’t get the memo telling them they’d been defeated almost 5 years ago, because they most certainly are not defeated, not even close.

The violence since the July handover of command in southern Afghanistan to NATO has been building since 2002 and is a direct result of the President taking his eye off the ball.  Before the invasion of Iraq, we were told that the Administration could walk and chew gum at the same time.  Given the way events in both Iraq and Afghanistan are unfolding, it looks like the Administration can do neither.

The laundry list of unfinished tasks in Afghanistan is long, but let’s start with just one:  security.  Members of this committee have been telling the Administration since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan that reconstruction efforts would fail without a secure and stable environment.  Deaf dumb and blind, this Administration has consistently miscalculated what was required to resolve the serious security problems facing Afghanistan. 

After the fall of the Taliban, and the establishment of the International Security Assistance Force, many of us on this committee called for an expansion of ISAF beyond the city limits of Kabul arguing that the presence of peacekeepers in the capital only was insufficient to provide the security necessary to deliver much needed relief and reconstruction assistance.  Those calls were rebuffed. 

Now drowning in billions of dollars of drug money the Afghan government cannot hope to provide basic law and order if the officials responsible for law and order are also the drug traffickers.  Indeed almost five years after the removal of the Taliban there are still vast areas of Afghanistan where the central government’s writ simply does not run.  Rather than being on the cusp of a free and prosperous future, Afghanistan is instead staring into the abyss of narcotics fueled anarchy.

The fact of the matter, Mr. Chairman, is that the people who attacked us on September 11 are still on the loose.  And they aren’t in Baghdad, they’re in Kandahar and Kabul and on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan where they’ve always been, operating in the same way they always have, supported by the same people who have always supported them. 

We have lost the moral high ground, Mr. Chairman, we have lost our allies and are now less popular in England than at any point since the revolution, we have lost billions to corruption and we’ve lost thousands of brave Americans with no happy end in sight.  The President led our military and our nation into a blind dead-end chasm from which there is no safe exit, and that is inexcusable. 

Today, the Bush Administration witnesses have cut and run from our oversight process, frightened by the truth that the President has led America into the worst strategic blunder in modern warfare.

            Thank you.

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