After 8 years of pursuit, Afghanistan remains an unbuilt nation

Announcing that Gen. David Petraeus would replace the defenestrated Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of the war in Afghanistan, President Obama was emphatic in saying that this was a change in people, not in policy.

That policy, which Obama described in a February 2009 interview with Jim Lehrer, was "that is that we make sure that [Afghanistan is] not a safe haven for al-Qaida, they are not able to launch attacks of the sort that happened on 9/11 against the American homeland or American interest." And that was George Bush's goal. The strategy Bush chose to accomplish it -- and the one Obama is continuing -- is nation-building, also known as "counterinsurgency" in military lingo.

By the end of August, over 100,000 U.S. troops will be engaged in the counterinsurgency campaign and in less than a year the final curtain will begin to fall on the greatest wartime mistake America has made since Lyndon Johnson put Robert McNamara in charge of the Vietnam War: the strategy of nation-building.

Though he campaigned against it, President Bush embraced nation-building in January 2003 when he chose a nation-building plan for post-war Iraq authored by Colin Powell and George Tenet over the plan for a brief invasion written by Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Myers. And, by default, nation-building was decided upon for Afghanistan as well.

We are now close to the end of the ninth year of our counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan and success -- as defined by Bush and Obama -- is nowhere in sight.

Now that the CRA is again in the news, here's a little awkward history on that fateful lunacy

From Vdare.com

...the Community Reinvestment Act was negligible until the 1990s. And it was still small potatoes until the Clinton “reforms” of 1995 and the rise of well-organized pressure groups of the kind affiliated with the NCRC.

But the biggest flood of CRA assurances came during the presidency of George W. Bush, who repeatedly called in 2002-2004 for 5.5 million more minority homeowners by 2010. Cumulative bank pledges (typically doled out over ten years) grew from $1.85 trillion in 2002 to $4.20 trillion in 2004.

Indeed, total CRA commitments increased by $1.63 trillion in 2004 alone, the first year of the Housing Bubble.