In many ways, it is a tale of two armies. Perhaps the most important mistake the Bush administration made after the invasion of Iraq was to disband that nation's army.

A Lebanese friend of mine, a man steeped in all the ways of his region, told me recently: "It was necessary for the Americans to get rid of Saddam Hussein. But in Iraq, they only needed to change the decision maker, they shouldn't have destroyed the one institution that bound the country together."

In Afghanistan, which holds its presidential election today, the mistake was similar. In the heady optimism following the military vanquishing of the Taliban, there did not seem at first to be very widespread opposition to the US and its allies in Afghanistan.

As a result, the US did not help the Afghan state...