A close call to be sure. Though the death toll is hazy, the implications of an attempted attack on our vice president by a suicide bomber are hard to miss.

A purported Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said Cheney was the target of the attack.

“We knew that Dick Cheney would be staying inside the base,” Ahmadi told The Associated Press by telephone. “The attacker was trying to reach Cheney.”

Yep, not only was Cheney the apparent target, but he was the apparent target by the Taliban.

Now, I’m sure there are going to be the squawkboxes saying “I’ll bet you liberals wish he WAS killed!” Hate to disappoint you, but that’s not at all the case here. Rather, this infuriates me because it tells me that the threat of terrorism is not even close to being eradicated in the very place we were supposed to have an easy handle on.

One of the unsaid presumptions about the Iraq invasion was that we could handle it because Afghanistan was such a cakewalk. We’d blow through there, sure the Taliban and Al Qaeda aren’t destroyed but they’re neutralized at least, and then march into Baghdad.

The extra peculiar thought is that if Cheney HAD been injured (or worse, killed) in such a blast, it would be taken as an indication not that the first leg of the “war on terror” had failed, but rather a reinforcement that it was necessary. This is the bizarre paradox of the WoT. In a normal war, finding that a lot of your enemies aren’t dead and that their leaders are still alive and capable of leading means you screwed up. Here, more terrorists is proof we need to expand the war.

Later in Kabul, Cheney and Karzai met privately for an hour and spoke about the “problems coming from Pakistan,” said an Afghan government official, a reference to cross-border infiltration by militants who launch attacks in Afghanistan.

“We understand now that the U.S. government realizes that in order to stop terrorism in Afghanistan and to stop terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, there must be a clear fight against terrorism in Pakistan,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Eeeeeexactly.