"Maybe if the US had concentrated on Afghanistan instead of diverting $700 million..."

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Remember Afghanistan?

Partly because the casualties are much lower than in Iraq, and partly because it's much more difficult to cover, the ongoing fighting in the southern and eastern provinces (nearest the Pakistan border) doesn't get much media coverage.

Knight Ridder updates us:

The Taliban have killed more than 40 U.S. soldiers and more than 800 Afghan officials, police, troops, aid workers and civilians since March in a campaign aimed at derailing Sept. 18 parliamentary and provincial elections and eroding confidence in President Hamid Karzai and his American-led backers. Borrowing tactics from their counterparts in Iraq, they've beheaded alleged informers and staged two suicide bombings, a form of terrorism rarely seen in Afghanistan.

The fighters of the resurgent Taliban movement are no match in face-to-face clashes for highly trained U.S. troops, who are equipped to fight at night and are backed by helicopter gunships, jets, unmanned spy planes, Afghan soldiers and local intelligence officers. But after suffering massive casualties in a series of major firefights, the Taliban have learned to avoid set-piece battles with the U.S. and Afghan troops who are trying to pen them up in the mountains so they can't sabotage the upcoming polls. The war has evolved into a bloody game of cat and mouse, a classic guerrilla struggle with echoes of the much larger and far bloodier conflicts in Iraq, Chechnya and Vietnam.

You might think that the war has been mostly over for a couple of years, but actually American casualties have steadily risen, from 12 in 2001 and 43 in 2002, to 69 so far this year. And in this war we have more allies who are also taking hits: 17 soldiers from Spain were killed on Tuesday after their helicopter was shot down.

Maybe if the US had concentrated on Afghanistan instead of diverting $700 million from the Afghani war effort to prepare for the Iraq invasion, maybe if scarce military and intelligence resources hadn't been pulled out prematurely -- well, maybe we wouldn't still be enduring "Operation Enduring Freedom."