An in-depth front page article in the New York Times yesterday lays out clearly how the war in Iraq has compromised success in the war in Afghanistan and how the Bush Administration's policy has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

The article lays out that once President Bush shifted focus from Afghanistan, a country harboring Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization that actually attacked us on 9/11, to Iraq, a country that had nothing at all to do with 9/11 and was kept in check by UN sanctions, the situation in Afghanistan began to deteriorate.

First, key resources, including personnel, technology, equipment,  intelligence gathering, and troops were diverted to prepare for the invasion of Iraq:

A former senior official of the Pentagon’s Central Command, which was running both wars, said that as the Iraq planning sped up, the military’s covert Special Mission Units, like Delta Force and Navy Seals Team Six, shifted to Iraq from Afghanistan.

So did aerial surveillance “platforms” like the Predator, a remotely piloted drone armed with Hellfire missiles that had been effective at identifying targets in the sparsely populated mountains of Afghanistan. Predators were not shifted directly from Afghanistan to Iraq, according to the former official, but as new Predators were produced, they went to Iraq.

“We were economizing in Afghanistan,” said the former official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “The marginal return for one more platform in Afghanistan is so much greater than for one more in Iraq.”

Second, overall assistance to Afghanistan plummeted at a time that it needed it most.  It decreased 38 percent from 2005 to 2006, while the death toll from attacks against US and NATO troops increased by 20 percent in that same time.

The article concludes:

Gen. James L. Jones, a retired American officer and a former NATO supreme commander, said Iraq caused the United States to “take its eye off the ball” in Afghanistan. He warned that the consequences of failure “are just as serious in Afghanistan as they are in Iraq.”

“Symbolically, it’s more the epicenter of terrorism than Iraq,” he said. “If we don’t succeed in Afghanistan, you’re sending a very clear message to the terrorist organizations that the U.S., the U.N. and the 37 countries with troops on the ground can be defeated.”

The bottom line is that the Bush Administration's policies in the "War on Terror" have made the US less safe.  They have allowed the Taliban to re-group, fueled terrorist recruitment levels, imperiled our military's ability to respond to pressing threats, sacrificed countless lives of brave Americans and innocent Iraqi civlians, and wasted billions of dollars in taxpayer money that could have been used to go after the real terrorists, or to give health care to all Americans, or allow all citizens to go to college.

While President Bush was supposed to be upholding his constitutional obligation to protect our country, he has instead devastated the security of the United State.