Speechless.
One mantra from the Bush administration since it launched its military campaign in Afghanistan 16 months ago has been that the United States will not walk away from the Afghan people.
President Bush has even suggested a Marshall plan for the country, and the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, will visit Washington later this month.
But in its budget proposals for FY 2003, the White House did not explicitly ask for any money to aid humanitarian and reconstruction costs in the impoverished country.
The chairman of the committee that distributes foreign aid, Jim Kolbe, says that when he asked administration officials why they had not requested any funds, he was given no satisfactory explanation, but did get a pledge that it would not happen again.
—“Afghanistan omitted from US aid budget,” the BBC, via Atrios.
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Shock and Awe: the book
"Shock and awe" is supposedly the name of the aggressive new US war-fighting strategy in which Baghdad will be saturated with 400 missiles in the first 24 hours of combat, as a number of sources have reported.