Afghanistan and Pakistan – Post 911

On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda terrorists flew hijacked airplanes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York. Nearly 3,000 people were killed. In response, President George W. Bush set his sights on Afghanistan.

Exactly how the Americans would fight in Afghanistan, and to what end, was still unclear. Aft first, Bush demanded only that the Taliban oust its leader, Mullah Omar, and cut its ties to Al Qaeda. This was the option that the president of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, was eagerly pushing. Pakistan had created and nurtured the Taliban and did not want to lose it. Musharraf urged its leaders to turn bin Laden over to the Americans, or at least expel him from Afghanistan. When they refused, he withdrew Pakistan support for the Taliban and gave the United States permission to launch bombing raids on Afghanistan from Pakistani air bases.

By mid-September, Bush had decided to use American military power to overthrow the Taliban regime. He was not willing, however, to send large numbers of troops. Instead he approved a dual strategy. The United States would conduct an air war, and hire the Northern Alliance to fight on the ground.

On October 7, Bush sat down behind a desk in the White House Treaty room, faced a television camera, and told Americans that Operation Enduring Freedom was under way.

On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.

He said the United States was locked in “a momentous struggle between god and evil,” that it was fighting to promote “God-given values” and “defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world.” America’s enemies, he declared on various occasions, “hate us for our freedoms,” “hate us because we love liberty,” and “hate us because we’re good.”

Air strikes on Afghanistan began as Bush was making his televised speech. The first round wiped out the Taliban’s rudimentary air defenses and destroyed its primitive military bases but had little effect beyond that.

Taliban Defeated, but Survive

Taliban leaders had reason to be hopeful. They had managed to withstand the first wave of American bombing. These weeks in preparation and war gave bin Laden plenty of time to escape into the network of caves and tunnels – much of it fortified with CIA money during the 1980s – that lay beneath the rugged border region known as Tora Bora. The fight against the Taliban went more successfully that the hunt for bin Laden.

By late October, bribes from the CIA enticed some warlords who supported the Taliban to change sides, and motivated others to attack Taliban positions. On November 13, Taliban commanders could no longer defend Kabul and led their men out to refuge elsewhere. Guerrillas from the Northern Alliance streamed in to replace them. They were received ecstatically. People dragged out hidden phonographs and played music for the first time in years. Women ran joyously through the streets without burkas.

Whether it was really a victory, however, is debatable. Americans deposed the regime that had given Al Qaeda its protected base, but by refusing to send more than a few hundred troops to fight in Afghanistan, they allowed terrorist leaders to escape punishment for the crimes of September 11.

Just weeks after the Taliban regime fell, at the end of 2001, a group of Afghan leaders assembled in Bonn and agreed to accept America’s handpicked candidate, Hamid Karzai, an English-speaking Pashtun leader who had spent most of the 1990s outside Afghanistan, to head a six month transitional government. To guide Karzai, the Americans named an ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, who had worked for Unocal in its unsuccessful effort to negotiate a pipeline deal with the Taliban.

Outside powers, most notably the United States, proved remarkably stingy when it came to aiding Afghanistan. This ensured that Afghanistan would remain in ruins; that warlords would continue to control much of the country; that remnants of the Taliban would reemerge as a fighting force; that bin Laden and other terrorist leaders would remain at large; and that the drug trade would become a steadily more important mainstay of the country’s economy.

Reflection

This war, and the terror attacks that set if off, would almost certainly never have occurred if the United States had not armed and trained tens of thousands of Islamic radicals during the 1980s, and then failed to act when those radicals began transforming themselves into terrorists.

Fateful misjudgments by five presidents had laid the groundwork not simply for the September 11 attacks but for the emergence of the world wide network from which they sprung. Jimmy Cater launched the covert CIA project in Afghanistan. During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan spent billions of dollars to arm and train anti-Western zealots who were fighting the Soviet there. George H. W. Bush further inflamed Muslim radicals by establishing permanent American military bases in Saudi Arabia, home of the holiest sites in Islam. Bill Clinton failed to grasp the scope of the threat his predecessors bequeathed to him, and during his presidency, guerrillas who had been trained and armed by the Untied States a decade earlier completed their transformation into terrorists. George W. Bush ignored repeated warnings that devastating attacks were imminent, including a memorandum from his intelligence advisors, just five weeks before September 11, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”