How Bad Is Bush?

This article in the New Republic is a wonderful primer on how incredibly bad a President our current one is. The scariest part, if you ask me, is the section on the "rebuilding" of Afghanistan. This I did not know or had forgotten:

based apparently on its aversion to allies, the administration blocked any non-U.S. troops from deploying outside Kabul for the first two years of the occupation. Not only were we unwilling to police Afghanistan; we weren't going to let anyone else do it, either. The absence of Western boots on the ground meant that responsibility for security was often entrusted to local warlords--whose increased clout, in turn, slowed the formation of a real Afghan national army.

Peter Bergen, the author of the piece, then compares Iraq of late 2003 with Afghanistan of now, and finds them to be eerily similar:

today, Afghanistan resembles nothing so much as Iraq in the fall of 2003, when the descent into chaos began. In 2006, IED attacks doubled, assaults on international forces tripled, and suicide bombings quintupled. In fact, last year saw the highest number of U.S. military and nato casualties since the fall of the Taliban. And 2007 is shaping up to be even worse, with suicide bombings up 69 percent from last year.

Read the piece. Your skin will crawl, and if you weren't angry before, you will be now.