From an interview with Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani scholar and expert on the connection between the Pakistani military and Muslim extremist groups …

Until Bush came into office, Ahmed thought his words mattered to America. In the 1980s, he discussed Taliban resistance with ambassadors over tea. In the 1990s, he collaborated with policymakers to raise Afghanistan’s profile in the Clinton White House. But during the Bush administration, he feels his risky research has been for naught.

The administration has “actively rejected expertise and embraced ignorance,” Ahmed told me inside his fortress. Soon after the Taliban fled Kabul in late 2001, Ahmed visited Washington DC’s policy elite as “the flavor of the month.” His bestseller Taliban had come out just the year before. The State Department, USAID, the National Security Council and the White House all asked him to present lectures on how to stabilize post-war Afghanistan.

Ahmed traversed the city’s bureaucracies and think tanks repeating “one common sense line”: In Afghanistan you have a “population on its knees, with nothing there, absolutely livid with the Taliban and the Arabs of Al Qaeda . . . willing to take anything.” The U.S. could “rebuild Afghanistan very quickly, very cheaply and make it a showcase in the Muslim world that says ‘Look U.S. intervention is not all about killing and bombing; it’s also about rebuilding and reconstruction…about American goodness and largesse.”

Many lifelong bureaucrats specializing in the region shared Ahmed’s enthusiasm, and they agreed that after decades of violence, America could finally turn Afghanistan around through aid. But the biggest players in Bush’s government, Ahmed says, had already shifted their attention to Iraq “abandoning Afghanistan at its moment of need.”

The claim that President Bush took his eyes off the ball in Afghanistan so he could rush into disaster in Iraq has been repeated so many times that it is almost a cliche. A true cliche. But something like a cliche nonetheless. It becomes shocking again, however, when you look at it up close. The most charged issue in the US — at least at the headline level — is the failure to bag bin Laden. But that’s not the only issue, in some ways not even the most important one because actually transforming Afghanistan (if that was possible, which I won’t pretend to know the answer to) would at least arguably have been of more consequence that killing or capturing this one man.

And as long as we’re on the subject, let’s track back to our earlier discussion of President Bush’s bogus ‘democracy promotion agenda.’ Remember, US policy makers have always been happy to push democracy on enemy states or among friends where there were no potential adverse policy consequences. The rub is always balancing support for democracy and the rule of law with more immediate policy needs.

So who are our main allied states in the War on Terror and the Muslim Middle East generally? The answer? Unquestionably, I think, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — one military dictatorship (if one with semi-constitutional and parliamentary attributes), with a military with a long history of ties to radical Islamists and another hereditary despotism riddled with sympathizers with radical Islamists.

Another outbreak of sanity from Obama sure too raise profound questions about whether he’s ready to be president.

From the AP …

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is leaping into the long-running Cuba debate by calling for the United States to ease restrictions for Cuban-Americans who want to visit the island or send money home.

Obama’s campaign said Monday that, if elected, the Illinois senator would lift restrictions imposed by the Bush administration and allow Cuban-Americans to visit their relatives more frequently, as well as ease limits on the amount of money they can send to their families.

A TPM Reader responds …

But there’s a reason for all these post-mortems: President Bush made the promotion of democracy abroad a centerpiece of his rhetoric, a touchstone of his public pronouncements. This administration has a genius for packaging its policies to appeal to ideals that the public cherishes, especially when its actions diverge most sharply from those ideals. That’s why when we aligned ourselves with odious and repressive regimes around the world in our war on terror we did so under the guise of spreading freedom. “Promoting Democracy” turns out to have been of a piece with the “Clean Skies” and “Healthy Forests” initiatives; asking what has happened to the “freedom agenda” is like asking what has happened to the president’s defense of the environment. He hasn’t just given us more of the same, he has covered the fact that he was making things worse by loudly proclaiming that he was making them better.

I take this point. There needs to be an accounting and Baker’s article in the Post provides it. I guess all I’m saying is that it’s worth keeping in mind that this wasn’t a bold initiative that fell short for whatever reasons. It was, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell’s famous interlocutor, claptrap all the way down.

Fred Thompson: The US military is in trouble and it’s Bill Clinton’s fault.

Election law and FEC regs are so routinely flouted these days that it’s hard to imagine anyone actually getting in serious trouble over them. But might Fred Thompson’s ‘I’m not running even though I’m already running and have even run through three campaign managers’ bamboozle actually land him in some trouble? Maybe so.

Join us as we take a fearless look behind the scenes of Rudy’s illegal immigration flip-flop in today’s episode of TPMtv. Not for the faint of heart. But if you’re man enough and Rudy enough, take a look …

With President Bush these days, often there’s nothing left to do but laugh. As when we learn that in a conversation with Egyptian democracy activist Saad Ibrahim, the president said, “You’re not the only dissident. I too am a dissident in Washington.” As Eric Kleefeld told me yesterday, President Bush seems confused. Dissidents are the ones who get tortured and wiretapped. Not the ones who do it. I guess that’s one of those sentence structure mistakes.

In any case, it’s not a simple matter disentangling the president’s vainglory from his narcissism. So for today let me just focus on the former.

As in the Post article from which that quote above comes, we are today frequently called on to see the president’s wrecked ‘democracy promotion agenda’ as an example of some sort of failed though laudable, even tragic, idealism. The president appears to think his plans have been sabotaged by an army of mediocrities running the State Department. If only he could steamroll them like the intelligence community!

But the whole story, like so much else from the Bush White House, is press and pomp with no substance. What’s remarkable is how little questioning there’s been about whether such an agenda ever existed at all — even from many who are normally the president’s critics. If the president wants kudos for speaking up for democracy at the level of rhetoric and looking the other way when it’s in the United States’ strategic interests, he can get in line — behind Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton and actually pretty much every other president of the post-war era. Indeed, pretty much every president in American history.

As many critics have argued, the substance of America’s role as a democracy-promoter may be debatable, but surely the claim or the conceit is nothing that began with this president. Indeed, the claim contrasted with the reality — sometimes sizing up well and other times not so well — is also beyond a cliche in the post-World War II era. Had the president taken any steps to push for democratization in Egypt, Saudi Arabia or anywhere in Central Asia, perhaps there’d be something to discuss. But of course nothing like that has happened.

Yes, there’ve been a number of elections in Afghanistan and Iraq. But that’s only because this administration has overthrown more governments on its watch. In recent decades pushing for anything short of some level of popular sovereignty has just been deemed unacceptable. Just the same happened in Central America and the Balkans, indeed, by most measures more successfully in the Balkans.

So let’s just stop the talk about what’s happened to the president’s ‘freedom agenda’. There just never was one. It’s really that simple.

Prostitute-patron and Senator David Vitter has 66% approval rating in home state of Louisiana. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

When you’re stuck down at 30% approval and down to your last 18 months in office, an administration really has to pick and choose its battles. Only real matters of principle are worth a fight. And the Bush administration has found one — resisting state efforts to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program to more middle income families.

Connecticut 2006 redux? Ned Lamont goes to Maine to campaign for Tom Allen, the Dem foe of GOP Senator and Lieberman ally Susan Collins. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.