ABSTRACT
On 7 October 2001, the United States (US), backed by what President George W. Bush claimed as ‘the collective will of the world’, launched Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) on Afghanistan. Less than a month earlier, on September 11, the dramatic images of planes hitting the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC were carved into the memory of people across the globe. Almost instantly, a rallying cry for war and revenge was sounded, and Afghanistan, a country many in the West would fi nd it hard to locate on a map, became the centre of these attacks as part of a wider ‘war on terror’.
