Bush offers new help to Afghans
WASHINGTON – Declaring that Afghanistan is no longer a “terrorist factory,” President Bush on Tuesday pledged new resources to better secure the country and foster its new democracy.
“The road ahead for Afghanistan is still long and difficult,” Bush said, “yet the Afghan people can know that their country will never be abandoned to terrorists and killers.”
Bush discussed the future of Afghanistan, as it prepares for elections in September, during a midday news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the White House Rose Garden.
In separate statements and in the question-and-answer session that followed, Bush and Karzai highlighted what they see as a much better Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion toppled the ruling Taliban after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks nearly three years ago.
“Afghanistan is no longer a terrorist factory, sending thousands of killers into the world,” Bush said, looking back to the days not so long ago when, he said, even the “smallest displays of joy were outlawed.”
“Free nations do not breed the ideology of terror,” he said.
Still, Osama bin Laden, several top lieutenants of his al Qaeda terrorist network and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the deposed Taliban leader, remain at large.
And retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, speaking for Democrat John Kerry’s presidential campaign on Tuesday, reiterated charges that Bush’s decision to invade Iraq had distracted from U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and in the broader international war against terrorism.
“The Pentagon and the administration decided that Afghanistan would be an economy-of-force effort, while they prepared to go to war with Iraq,” Clark charged. “As a result, the security forces were inadequate. The economic assistance and provision for long-term reconstruction was inadequate. And people in Afghanistan have had to make do with far less support in the transition to a new form of government.”
“Afghanistan has emerged from a very dark era, one of oppression and terror,” Karzai said at the Capitol.