WASHINGTON: One year after the beginning of the US-led war against the Taliban, Afghanistan has faded from the screens of US media coverage.

Gone are the times when Afghanistan dominated daily press briefings at the White House or Pentagon. Instead, the media shifted away from the first target in the ‘war on terrorism’ to another, more daunting challenge: A possible attack on Iraq geared toward unseating President Saddam Hussein.

The Bush administration’s tough position on Iraq has not gone uncriticized. Opponents, international and domestic, argue the US government should learn from the Afghanistan experience and not rush into opening a second front without a concise post-victory plan to stabilise Iraq.

While victory in Afghanistan was fast, achieving peace has been much slower. When US airstrikes began on October 7, 2001 it was a matter of weeks before the strict Taliban regime collapsed. Soon the Americans — and the international community — installed an interim government led by President Hamid Karzai, who has since been elected as president.

He is trying to rebuild a country ravaged by decades of civil war, buoyed in part by a civilian population happy it can once again listen to music, send its girls to school and shave its beards without fear of being punished or even executed.

The US operation Enduring Freedom was also successful in at least weakening the ultimate target: Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network. Hundreds of suspected Al Qaeda members were killed or apprehended, and some have provided useful information to the US government.

All of this, with only 19 American soldier deaths.

But the mission wasn’t a complete success. US and coalition forces captured neither Osama nor the leader of the Taliban regime, Mullah Omar. Snatching or killing Osama was a key objective of Enduring Freedom, as Bush made clear only days after the September 11 attacks by saying the terrorist leader was “wanted, dead or alive.”

Eliminating the terrorist leader or Omar would have been a huge symbolic victory. But now, Osama is rarely mentioned during the president’s speeches. The Saudi native has been replaced by a more enduring American foe: Saddam Hussein.

Critics, including several military experts, argue a flawed war strategy allowed the escape of top terrorists and Taliban leaders. They say the US military overly relied on friendly Afghan forces on the ground, like the Northern Alliance, to minimize American casualties. Those forces were more interested in liberation from the Taliban rather than fighting its fleeing leadership or Osama bin Laden.

One retired general called the Afghan strategy largely an “antiseptic war” — with too much reliance on bombs dropped from airplanes, and too little resolve to do the bloody work on the ground. As a result, control in the outcome was left out of “the hands” of the United States, he said.

Waging war from the air also left the Afghan population somewhat bitter. Various estimates say anywhere between 600 and 3,000 innocent civilians died during US air raids.

The lack of an American presence on the ground has been cited by critics as a reason Karzai’s government has struggled to reign in the warlords and stabilise the country.

The US refusal to expand the UN peacekeeping mission, which is limited to Kabul, continues to undermine Karzai, political analysts say.

Critics have also argued the United States, which has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid for the country, has been too distant from the financial situation and has failed to develop a policy for stabilising the war-torn country.

Some of them complain the 8,500 US troops operating the country have the sole purpose of hunting the remnants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but have not helped rebuild Afghanistan, such as creating schools.

One Democratic US senator recently warned that if the United States attacks Iraq, it must have a different approach than in Afghanistan.

“We cannot go in, hit and then leave the rest to others,” he said.—dpa