This Jake Tapper piece today is typical of what I’m reading and hearing: Blame for Afghanistan falls on Bush the elder, and his secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, for not concentrating enough on Afghanistan in the early 1990’s, as well as on Bush the decider, and his vice president, Dick Cheney, for ignoring Afghanistan to wage war in Iraq. What’s missing is any analysis of the eight years of Clinton. Here’s a good piece by James Risen in the New York Times from 1998 that shows what wasn’t going on in terms of our Afghan policy:

In February 1989, the last Soviet troops wearily crossed the bridge over the Amu Darya out of Afghanistan, a defeated army walking home to an empire on the verge of disintegration.
Now, nearly a decade later, the Russians are back, secretly engaged in the new Afghan war, according to United States and foreign officials.
This time, though, the Russians are after oil, as well as protection of their borders. In what senior American officials believe may be part of a larger Russian strategy to reassert influence over Central Asia and its vast oil reserves, Moscow has begun to play a major supporting role on the side of a rebel coalition fighting a civil war against the Taliban, the militant Islamic group that controls most of the country.
While it has not committed troops into a country where at least 13,000 of its soldiers died during a nine-year occupation, Russia is supplying heavy weapons, training and logistical support to the northern alliance, the rebel group that is hanging on to the mountainous northern tier of Afghanistan.
The Russians find themselves in loose collaboration with Iran in countering the growing power of the Taliban. In fact, American officials and other experts say Iran is now supplying even more arms, fuel and other resources to the anti-Taliban rebels than is Russia.
Squared off against Russia and Iran in this post-cold-war confrontation are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which are backing the Taliban.
And in this land of constantly shifting and often murderous alliances, the Russians are supporting rebel factions controlled by former leaders of the Afghan mujahedeen, the Islamic guerrillas who fought the Soviet Army in the 1980’s with the backing of the Central Intelligence Agency. A prime beneficiary of Russian support is the rebel group led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, who once was one of the most aggressive and effective mujahedeen figures in the C.I.A.’s covert program against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The irony of the situation has not been lost on Mr. Massoud’s one-time American backers. ”Massoud was the pointed end of the stick, the man we went to when we really wanted something done against the Russians,” an American intelligence official said.
Yet as the Russians move back into Afghanistan, the American role in the country seems to be diminishing. The United States, which took such an intense interest in Afghanistan in the 1980’s when the Reagan Administration viewed it as a crucial cold-war battleground, is only a marginal player there today, overshadowed by the more direct involvement of American oil companies, according to independent experts and officials from other countries.
The Clinton Administration supports neither side in the war. It has harshly criticized the Taliban for their militant policies, especially their treatment of women, and refuses to recognize it as the government of Afghanistan.
The Administration’s involvement has been limited to support for international negotiations to end the war, which has intensified since the Taliban captured Kabul, the capital, in 1996. In May, Bill Richardson, the American representative at the United Nations, visited Afghanistan to try to jump-start the peace talks. Yet Western analysts say the United States has not made an aggressive effort to curb foreign intervention.
A State Department official disagreed, saying the issue had been raised during American efforts to mediate a peace accord. ”We have been very clear that arms shipments must stop,” the official said.

Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated by the Taliban on September 9, 2001.

There’s also a meme that we are the ones that armed the Taliban for the fight today. There’s no doubt that some of this is true, but, again, this leaves out what was happening in between the two Bush presidencies as well as all of the surplus Soviet arms that were left in Afghanistan. From that Risen piece:

Moscow denies that it is arming the Afghan rebels, and Mr. Massoud has said in interviews that he receives much of his equipment from the Russian mafia, not the Russian Government. American officials believe that the rebels do acquire equipment on the international arms market, but are still convinced that both the Russian and Iranian Governments are directly involved.
In fact, American intelligence officials say that both the northern alliance and the Taliban now field such impressive arsenals that they could not acquire, maintain and operate them without foreign assistance. Both sides have hundreds of T-54 and T-62 Russian-designed tanks, along with towed artillery, multiple-rocket launchers, and MIG-21 and SU-17 fighter aircraft, according to United States intelligence estimates.
While the abundance of surplus weaponry left over from the Soviet-supplied Afghan Army is being used by both the rebels and the Taliban, the demands for spare parts, maintenance and training have forced the two sides to seek outside support.

And then there’s this history on when the Taliban came into existence:

The Taliban, with their base among the Pathans, Afghanistan’s majority ethnic group, were formed in 1994 in rural southern Afghanistan. The Taliban finally took Kabul in September 1996, ousting the Massoud forces and the Government of Burhanuddin Rabbani, part of the guerrilla coalition that had ousted the Soviet-backed Government in 1992.

That was 1994. Maybe Bush’s policies as governor of Texas and Dick Cheney as CEO of Haliburton are somehow to blame as well? (Oil maybe?)

Risen concludes:

The heavy commitment by foreign sponsors has led to a military stalemate between the Taliban and the northern alliance, especially in the last year, during which the Taliban have been unable to dislodge the rebels from their strongholds.
”The flow of arms, money and other supplies into Afghanistan from outside has continued unabated,” a new United Nations report states. United Nations officials, the report adds, have evidence of large arms shipments to both sides. The officials have witnessed air deliveries of weapons and ammunition by unmarked aircraft to the northern alliance, which are arriving at a rate of at least four to five a week.
On the other side, the United Nations report said the Taliban were getting foreign arms shipments that include the delivery of tanks and armored personnel carriers. A 200-truck convoy of military equipment recently arrived for Taliban forces, the report said.
United Nations officials in Afghanistan also reported seeing foreign military advisers aiding both sides.
”The problem,” a United States official said, ”is that the Afghans still see that the solutions to their problems come from fighting.”

Mistakes were made in Afghanistan by everyone for the past 20 years. The hope is that Obama is now getting it right.