Anyone recalls Osama Bin Laden's Warning to the US?

Here Tom talks about the collapse of the uno Super Power and draws his analogy from Afghanistan - how in the 80s the USSR got bogged down there. [The Soviets were, in part, brought to the edge of bankruptcy and collapse by a war supported to the hilt, and to the tune of billions of dollars as well as massive infusions of weaponry, by the other superpower.]

This lesson was not lost on Osama Bin Laden. Does anyone recall a speech some two years ago by OBL in which he spoke directly to George Bush and explicitly warned him that he (OBL) will bring the US economy down on its knees? [That this has come to pass is, of course, partly the result of the Bush administration's many imperial blunders, including its invasion of Iraq and its urge to garrison the oil lands of the planet from the Middle East to Central Asia.] - t

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It is far clearer now, as American economic power visibly crumbles, that rather than a victor and a vanquished there were two great power losers in the Cold War. The weaker, the Soviet Union, simply imploded first, while the U.S., enwreathed in a rhetoric of triumphalism and self-congratulation, was far more slowly making its way toward the exit. Seldom mentioned here, however, is a grotesque irony: as the U.S. seems to be experiencing the beginning stages of its imperial implosion, it is also—as the Soviet Union was in the 1980s—enmired in a war without end in Afghanistan against a ragtag army of Afghan insurgents supported by foreign jihadist volunteers.

One difference, of course: The Soviets were, in part, brought to the edge of bankruptcy and collapse by a war supported to the hilt, and to the tune of billions of dollars as well as massive infusions of weaponry, by the other superpower. The U.S. is heading for its analogous moment without an enemy superpower in sight. If anything, a single man—Osama bin Laden—might be said to have filled the former superpower role, which, were the results less grim, would be little short of farcical. That this has come to pass is, of course, partly the result of the Bush administration's many imperial blunders, including its invasion of Iraq and its urge to garrison the oil lands of the planet from the Middle East to Central Asia. Like all historical analogies, the Afghan one may be less than exact, but it does stare us in the face and, eerie as it is, it's hard to account for its absence from discussion here in the U.S.

If you want to grasp just how deeply the United States is now entangled in its own catastrophic Afghan War, you need only read the following report. For obvious reasons, it's rare for TomDispatch to have on-the-spot reporting. So consider this an exceptional exception. Anand Gopal is a superb young journalist who writes regularly for the Christian Science Monitor. Here, he considers the failed U.S. surge in Afghanistan—yes, there was one back in 2007—as well as the costs for Afghan civilians and the increasingly powerful Taliban insurgency that has emerged from it. His report could not be more vivid or more sobering for a country readying itself, under a new president, to pour yet more troops into Afghanistan. Tom