In the wake of the U.S. military victory over the Taliban, President Bush warned America in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002,

"Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears.... We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities.... What we have found in Afghanistan confirms that, far from ending there, our war against terror is only beginning."

The news that al-Qaeda was targeting American nuclear reactors was the most chilling revelation in Bush’s speech. Senior CIA and FBI officials gave background briefings to the Washington media in the wake of the speech, amplifying the threat that Afghanistan-based al-Qaeda fighters were targeting U.S. nuclear-power facilities. This news made the terrorist threat far more ominous and may have spurred support for Bush’s preemptive war policy.

Two years later, the Bush administration admitted that the president’s statement was false and that no nuclear-power-plant diagrams had been discovered in Afghanistan. A senior Bush administration official told the Wall Street Journal, “There’s no additional basis for the language in the speech that we have found.” Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Edward McGaffigan, who had testified in 2002 on this issue in closed hearings on Capitol Hill, commented that Bush was “poorly served by a speech-writer.”

Or this -

In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush, listing the achievements of the invasion of Afghanistan, declared, “The mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes.... Today women are free.”

But most Afghan women have yet to experience the Bush deliverance. A January 2003 UN report on conditions in rural Afghanistan concluded that “the situation of women has not changed to any great extent since the removal of the Taliban.”

The U.S. State Department, in a February 2004 report on Afghanistan, noted the following imperfections in Afghan equal rights:

Kabul police authorities placed women under detention in prison, at the request of family members, for defying the family’s wishes on the choice of a spouse.

Tribal elders resolved murder cases by ordering defendants to provide young girls in marriage to the victims’ families, in punishment for the murder.

In some areas, women were forbidden to leave the home except in the company of a male relative.

Some local authorities excluded women from all employment outside the home, apart from the traditional work of women in agriculture.

In Herat province, ruler-warlord Ismael Khan closed down all beauty parlors and banned women from working as tailors.

The government of the Nangarhar province banned all women entertainers from radio and television in April 2004.