ABSTRACT
Afghanistan barely figured on the US foreign policy map until late in 1979. Even the Saur revolution in 1978, bringing Afghan communists to power, was tolerable. Washington's policy reflected a willingness to recognize, more or less, the Soviet's greater interest in Afghanistan and the American inability to do much about it. Only when the Soviet Union directly intervened militarily and was perceived to have wider strategic ambitions did that view change. But once the Soviet Union was gone, the United States quickly turned elsewhere, despite the unresolved conflict. Taliban rule prompted a refocusing, mainly around the issue of terrorism. Any possibility that the country would again fall off Washington's radar screen once sanctions against the Taliban yielded Osama bin Laden vanished with the events of September 11, 2001. The United States and the international community essentially have been buying time for Afghanistan.
