While House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi responded to the president's Saturday radio address with a depressing portrait of a lost war, topped by one Osama bin Laden still at large, the real Afghanistan marched on. Via Patrick Belton, OxBlog's Afghanistan correspondent sent the following:

First: the clear losers of this election are the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and rebels against the Kabul government. With just over two weeks remaining before the Afghan presidential elections, the malcontents have already lost. For months, they have threatened to create a generalized atmosphere of fear in which no one would dare go to the polls. It is safe to say that they have failed. They failed to prevent mass voter registration; the murders of many brave election workers did not deter millions of Afghans from registering for the vote (some more than once, but that’s another story). The handful of explosions and attacks that the Afghan insurgents have managed in the last few weeks are pitiful in comparison to (say) the daily uproar in Iraq. And they have run out of time. Whatever atrocities they manage to commit in the coming days, it is hard to imagine anything dramatic enough to deter more than a handful of likely voters. Another bomb or two before October 9 is not going to do the trick. The insurgents simply cannot affect enough of the country to manage widespread voter intimidation.

...[T]he political skill demonstrated by Karzai since July, and the popularity he clearly possesses, are reason for optimism. Afghans themselves are optimistic. The country has passed its major political challenges reasonably well since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 – forming a transitional cabinet, drafting and approving a constitution, maintaining a steady civilian government in Kabul. The next milestone, Afghanistan’s first free presidential election in over a decade, also looks to be a qualified success. For now, that’s quite an achievement.

For over a week now the White House-obsessed Democratic Party has blundered into encouraging the enemies of the free world by mocking the democratic efforts in Baghdad and Kabul, an exposition that is as stunning as it is terminal. When the left says it wants to "win the war," it now means the war against domestic obstacles to power. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and John Fitzgerald Kennedy; all would be equally foreign and impugned by the party that was once theirs.

It's remarkable to see what a difference five to six years, a succeeded president, a cataclysmic introduction to the full capabilities of terrorism and a reemergence of American initiative has done to the objectives of each major political party in Washington, D.C.

Isolationism has not yet rinsed out of the American cloth; Democrats as well as Republicans have suffered the political misfortunes that come from blinkered self-importance. When one understands the nature of the struggle against authoritarianism and terrorists, the ten years of aimlessness between the war with Soviet totalitarians and Islamist ones are tragic. But somehow necessary, if only to recognize the folly therein. I wrote in short essay "Fitting the Shoe":

Bill Clinton, never one to rock the boat after the tumultuous first half of his first term, played it safe by skipping Rwanda, showing all talk and no trousers with Saddam Hussein and putting a foot down to stop the post-Soviet Balkan wars almost ten years after they'd started. Of Clinton's Republican opposition, some were dedicated America-firsters, most others understandably suspicious of 1990s "nation-building" they'd seen (especially of that run by the United Nations). But the GOP too took a pass, letting Clinton off the hook for his hollow resolve against Hussein and paining him for Bosnia [and Kosovo]; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich himself submitting in 1995 that "You have to be fairly juvenile to think we could stop Rwanda." I myself beamed when Governor Bush spoke in 2000 about the need to withdraw from United Nations missions across the globe; that the United States could not be all things to all people.

That's a time when I would have agreed with the idea that "we can't take down every despot." That was before terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. taught me and millions of others that there is no "live and let live" with dictatorship, and the concepts that "have always been" applicably date back only to the latter-18th Century, and are easily corrected with public will.

Comically unlike the press' coverage of Iraq, the "wave of political violence" that "[w]racked" Kosovo in 2000 never found its way into a New York Times report on a Republican Congress' balk at then-President Clinton's continued NATO presence in the Balkans. The report, in this Free Republic thread, is followed by the most distrustful and cynical bile to be offered by the parochialist left, known to others as the Buchananite "antiwar right." Stumbling on it, I found a curious vignette. The director of a major "antiwar" site began the thread; some three years later a Free Republic thread was pulled from the mea culpa of a former isolationist who, like many on the right, was changed irrevocably by September 11th, and made certain to repudiate that director.

A volume is written by one's response to a life-altering, paradigm-shattering event. For all the nonsense entered into the record by some members of the GOP, Republicans moved one step closer to Commander-in-Chief Clinton and often argued for more solid logistics or strategy; bothered instead by the idea of American troops entering into an "immaculate war" conducted by foreign powers. After September 11th, their caviling was nearly silenced. Judging by inexcusable statements today, Democrats — led by their presidential candidate — were, when they vigorously defended Clinton's actions, not interested in intervention and assertive democratization so much as the idea of American troops in blue helmets:

Well, Kosovo is a very difficult and dangerous place, and we are sent here, after all, to make the difficult decisions. ...What is happening in Kosovo is a challenge to the conscience of our country, what is happening in Kosovo is a challenge to the future of NATO.

...Kosovo is a challenge to our conscience. Just a few years earlier Bosnia was, and over 200,000 people were killed there. I wondered when I was a child and first learned about the Holocaust and read The Diary Of Anne Frank as a teenager, I wondered how did this ever happen? Didn't anybody know? Why didn't anybody do anything about it? And when the Bosnian situation came along, I could see how it happened. People knew, people cared, but people did not want to get involved.

Nancy Pelosi, on the floor of the House of Representatives, March 11, 1999. Pelosi voted against, of course, the 2002 and 1991 Congressional resolutions authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein. Many, many more than 200,000 are buried between Afghan and Iraqi ground. And Afghan democracy, not the capture of one man, will put an end to the gross slaughter of tyranny. How do these terrible things ever happen, Nancy? Now you know.