From The S.F. Chronicle
Editorial

The sickening suicide bombing last Tuesday at the main American base in Afghanistan, within earshot of Vice President Dick Cheney, was bloody proof of the U.S. failure to prevail in a country that should have been our central front in the war on terrorism.

Equally discouraging is the evidence that the al Qaeda leadership has regrouped, not in Afghanistan, but in remote areas of Pakistan.

That, almost certainly, is where the man most responsible for the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, is hiding. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Risen wrote in “State of War,” “The most wanted man in the world (is) sitting safely across the border from the Americans, thinking about how best to strike the West again.”

Yet, for years, the Bush administration has portrayed the war in Afghanistan as a glorious American victory. Most Americans have shared that view.

“The Taliban are gone, the al Qaeda are gone,” declared then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on CNN’s “Larry King Live” in December 2002. “There are people who are throwing hand grenades and shooting off rockets and trying to kill people, but there are people trying to kill people in New York or San Francisco.”