ABSTRACT
The 9/11 attacks on the United States were masterminded by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who maintained their base of operations in Afghanistan under the protection of the ruling Taliban regime. Bin Laden, a Saudi by birth, had become familiar with Afghanistan when he joined the resistance against the Soviet invasion of that country (1979–1989). The resistance fighters (mujahideen) received American money and weapons to fight the Soviets. At that time, too, bin Laden established relations with members of the Pakistani army, who helped train the mujahideen. American retaliation against al-Qaeda was swift. Within a month after 9/11, US troops arrived in Afghanistan to carry out the mission of overthrowing the Taliban government and uprooting al-Qaeda’s safe haven. Neighboring Pakistan was an American ally in that effort, though some in the military leadership were suspected of Taliban sympathies. The initial military campaign in Afghanistan was overwhelmingly successful: the Taliban and al-Qaeda were ousted without a single US fatality. However, the war in Afghanistan then bogged down for a number of reasons, including the historical independence of the countryside from whatever power purported to command the country from its capital (Kabul): “Overrunning Afghanistan is not the same as controlling it,” observes military historian Stephen Tanner. Also, although it is neatly drawn on maps, the on-the-ground Afghan-Pakistani border is nonexistent. It is a rugged area occupied by some 40 million Pashtuns, a tribal people with a fierce history of armed insularity from either Kabul or Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. With the American onslaught, the Taliban and al-Qaeda were able to flee to “Pashtunistan,” as Tanner calls the mountainous tribal region, and there find refuge and support for reorganizing and mounting counterattacks against American and Afghan security forces. But another reason for the failure to defeat the Taliban decisively and establish Afghanistan as a democratic state was that the United States took its eye off the ball. Flushed by the easy success and apparent victory in Afghanistan, neoconservatives with influence on the George W. Bush administration were seduced by the opportunity to leverage the newly declared “war on terror” to remake the Middle East in ways more compatible with the interests of the world’s lone superpower, the United States. And the immediate target was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. As 190Tanner notes, the chief public justification for the war—that Saddam was creating weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including nuclear weapons, and was prepared to employ them against the US homeland—was “absurd.” Nonetheless, 170,000 American troops were eventually deployed to Iraq, which was ultimately left with a Shiite-dominated government whose “natural ally in the region was Iran”—certainly not the consequence envisioned by American neoconservatives, who abhorred the anti-American Islamic theocracy of Iran as much as they had detested the anti-American secular dictatorship of Saddam’s Iraq. Meanwhile, though, fighting the war in Iraq meant that the United States had left the Afghan war largely neglected. In 2006, the Taliban mounted a major offensive, possibly with the connivance of elements of Pakistani military intelligence. However, a “surge” of American troops in Afghanistan—similar to the more than 20,000 additional troops deployed in Iraq to combat the insurgency there—helped stabilize the situation significantly, though the Taliban was far from extinguished. In May 2012—almost exactly a year after Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs in his house in Abbottabad, Pakistan—President Barack Obama announced that the original goals of the American presence in Afghanistan had been met, claiming that al-Qaeda had been defeated and that the Taliban’s momentum had been broken. In consequence, all US troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, finally ending what would be America’s thirteen-year war in that country.
