The first failure!

The headline at McClatchy reads Afghanistan: America's forgotten war. It could just as easily read Afghanistan: Bush's first failure. Under this headline we have several stories of failure and another country descending into chaos.

4 U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan as insurgents step up attacks

KABUL, Afghanistan - A roadside bomb attack killed four U.S. soldiers and wounded three others in southern Afghanistan on Sunday as Taliban insurgents pressed an escalating guerrilla war nearly four years after their radical Islamic movement was swept from power.

A new Taliban has re-emerged in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — Nearly four years after a U.S.-led military intervention toppled them from power, the Taliban has re-emerged as a potent threat to stability in Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, the war is still going strong

LANDING ZONE NORTH DAKOTA, Afghanistan -- The Bush administration declared more than two years ago that major combat in Afghanistan was over. Tell that to the 60 young men of Battle Company. For the past four months, the U.S. paratroopers and other American units have been fighting a war thousands of feet up among the peaks and defiles of one of history's most grueling battlefields.

They're facing guerrillas who were born there, hardened by poverty, and steeped in a centuries-old tradition of resisting foreigners. The guerrillas' aim is to impose another hard-line Islamic regime on Afghanistan, one that might make the country once again a sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

Taliban rebels have killed more than 40 U.S. soldiers and more than 800 Afghan officials, police, troops, aid workers and civilians since March. The escalating violence is aimed at derailing Sept. 18 parliamentary and provincial elections and eroding confidence in President Hamid Karzai and his American-led backers.

And from the Washington Post we have this:
Afghan City's Rebound Cut Short

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Less than a year ago, this was a city on the rebound after years of conflict, drought and political isolation. Business was booming with an influx of international development aid, shops stayed open late, markets burst with locally grown fruit and traffic snarled hopelessly much of the time.

Today Kandahar is a ghost town, braced for the next suicide bomb and full of refugees from rural districts where Taliban insurgents are battling Afghan and NATO forces. Streets are all but empty of vehicles, foreign aid offices are reduced to skeleton crews and shoppers hurry home before dark instead of lingering at tea shops.

Yes Afghanistan will be chapter one of the Bush/Cheney legacy of failure. While the war in Lebanon and the criminal coverage of JonBenet Ramsey have pushed Afghanistan and Iraq out of the news cycle those failed wars will be the legacy of George W. Bush and not the one he wanted.