Mali and France

The Afgan War

By Rares Zavaleanu

Prelude

On December 24, 1979, Soviet tanks rolled across the Amu Darya River and into Afghanistan, ostensi‐bly to restore stability following a coup that installed a pair of Marxist-Leninist political parties, the Peo‐ple's (Khalq) Party and the Banner (Parcham) Party. However, the Soviet presence sparked a nationwide rebellion led by fighters known as mujahideen who saw Islam as a unifying source of inspiration. These fighters received extensive covert support from Pak‐istan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, and they were joined in battle by foreign volunteers (who soon formed a network, known as al-Qaeda, to coor‐dinate their efforts). The Soviet forces were driven out of the country in 1989 as a result of the guerrilla war. In the absence of the Soviets, the mujahideen overthrew Afghanistan's Soviet-backed government and in‐stalled a transitional government. However, the mujahideen were politically divided, and the armed conflict escalated in 1994. The Tal‐iban rose to power and took over Kabul in 1996. It imposed a harsh interpretation of Islamic law, for ex‐ample, forbidding female education and prescribing hand severing or even execution as punishment for minor offenses. That same year, after being expelled from Sudan, alQaeda leader Osama bin Laden was welcomed to Afghanistan and established his organization's headquarters there. By the summer of 2001, the Tal‐iban had gained control of more than 90 percent of Afghan territory with the support of al-Qaeda. On September 9, that year, al-Qaeda hit men assas‐sinated famed mujahideen leader Ahmad Shah Ma‐soud, who was leading the Northern Alliance (a loose coalition of mujahideen militias that main‐tained control of a small section of northern Afghanistan at the time) in its fight against the Tal‐iban and had unsuccessfully sought greater US sup‐port for his efforts.

9/11, or how the war started

On September 11, 2001, at 8:45 a.m. on a clear Tuesday morning, an American Airlines Boeing 767 carrying 20,000 gallons of jet fuel crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact ripped a gaping, burning hole near the 80th floor of the 110-story skyscraper, killing hun‐dreds instantly and trapping hundreds more on higher floors. As the evacuation of the tower and its twin began, television cameras broadcast live images of what appeared to be a freak accident at first. The collision resulted in a massive explosion that rained down burning debris on nearby buildings and onto the streets below. It was immediately clear that America was under attack. As millions of people watched the events in New York, American Airlines Flight 77 circled over down‐town Washington, D.C., before crashing into the west side of the Pentagon military headquarters at 9:45 a.m. The jet fuel from the Boeing 757 caused a devastat‐ing inferno, resulting in the structural collapse of a portion of the massive concrete building that serves as the headquarters of the United States Depart‐ment of Defense. In total, 125 military and civilian personnel, as well as all 64 people aboard the airliner, were killed in the Pentagon. The horror in New York took a catastrophic turn less than 15 minutes after the terrorists struck the nerve center of the US military, when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed in a massive cloud of dust and smoke. The skyscraper's structural steel, designed to with‐stand winds of more than 200 miles per hour and a large conventional fire, could not withstand the tremendous heat generated by the burning jet fuel. The north building of the twin towers collapsed at 10:30 a.m. Only six people survived the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Almost 10,000 other people were treated for injuries, many of which were se‐vere. The hijacking and crash of four American jetliners drew immediate attention to Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda had claimed the attack, and some of the 19 hijackers had trained in Afghanistan. Following the attacks, President George W. Bush's administration converged on a strategy of first oust‐ing the Taliban from Afghanistan and dismantling alQaeda, while others considered actions in Iraq, in‐cluding long-standing plans to depose President Saddam Hussein. When Taliban leader Mullah Mo‐hammed Omar refused to “deliver to the United States authorities all the leaders of al-Qaeda who hide in your land,” US officials began implementing a war plan. The campaign in Afghanistan began covertly on September 26, with a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) team known as Jawbreaker arriving in the country and launching an overthrow strategy with anti-Taliban allies. The CIA team was quickly joined by special forces contingents from the United States and the United Kingdom, and together they provided arms, equipment, and advice to the Afghans. They also assisted in the coordination of targeting for the air campaign, which began on October 7, 2001, with US and British warplanes pounding Taliban targets, officially launching Operation Enduring Freedom. Northern Alliance forces began to take over a series of towns previously held by the Taliban in late Octo‐ber. The forces worked with US assistance, but they defied US wishes when they marched into Kabul on November 13 as the Taliban retreated without a fight. Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan and the Taliban's spiritual home, fell on December 6, bringing the Taliban's reign to an end. One of the final major battles of the first phase of the war occurred in March 2002, when US and Afghan forces fought 800 al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in the eastern province of Paktia. The operation also marked the entry of troops from other countries into the conflict, with special operations forces from Aus‐tralia, Canada, Denmark, France,

With the fall of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the world‐wide spotlight switched to Afghanistan's rehabilita‐tion and nation-building efforts. In a speech at the Virginia Military Institute in April 2002, Bush launched a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan, promising major financial support. However, development initiatives in Afghanistan were underfunded from the start, since emphasis in Washington had shifted to the approaching conflict in Iraq. The United States Congress appropriated al‐most $38 billion in humanitarian and reconstruction assistance to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2009. More than half of the funds were spent on training and equipping Afghan security personnel, with the remaining representing a fraction of what experts estimated would be needed to develop a country that has repeatedly ranked near the bottom of global human development indices. The aid program was also hampered by waste and confusion over whether civilian or military officials were in charge of education, health, agriculture, and other development programs. Despite military commitments from dozens of US al‐lies, the US initially opposed letting the other inter‐national soldiers, known as the International Secu‐rity Assistance Force (ISAF), to move beyond the Kabul area. That decision was made by the Penta‐gon, which was concerned that Afghanistan would become a drain on US resources as attention switched to Iraq. When ISAF did move past Kabul, its activities were impeded by the “caveats” of its component countries—restrictions that prevented all but a handful of the forces from actively fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The force, which was led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the organization's first operation outside of Europe, was also hampered by a paucity of troops as interna‐tional pledges to Afghanistan waned. The United States has consistently been the largest foreign force in Afghanistan, and it has suffered the most casualties. By the spring of 2010, more than 1,000 US personnel had been killed in Afghanistan, while 300 British troops and 150 Canadians had been slain. Both the United Kingdom and Canada had troops stationed in Afghanistan's south, where the combat had been fierce. More than 20 other countries lost troops during the conflict, while many, including Germany and Italy, preferred to concen‐trate their forces in the north and west, where the resistance was weaker. As the battle carried on and losses mounted, the war lost favor in many Western countries, prompting domestic political pressure to keep troops out of harm's way or to withdraw them entirely. At first glance, the conflict appeared to be won with relative ease. On May 1, 2003, United States Secre‐tary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared the end of "major combat" in Afghanistan. On the same day, President Bush proclaimed from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln that “major combat opera‐tions in Iraq have ended.” At the time, the United States had 8,000 troops in Afghanistan. On October 9, 2004, the first democratic Afghan elections since the Taliban's fall were held, with about 80% of regis‐tered voters voting to give Karzai a full five-year term as president.A year later, parliamentary elections were held, with scores of women claiming seats specifically aside for them to ensure gender diver‐sity. The 2004 constitution established a dominant central government and weak regional and local governments in Afghanistan, a framework that ran counter to the country's long-standing traditions. De‐spite the constitution's broad powers, Karzai was largely viewed as a weak leader who became in‐creasingly isolated as the war continued. He sur‐vived multiple assassination attempts, including a rocket strike on a helicopter he was traveling in in September 2004, and security concerns kept him mainly restricted to Kabul's presidential palace. Karzai's government was plagued by corruption, and efforts to establish a national army and police force were hampered from the outset due to a lack of foreign backing and ethnic divisions among Afghans.

The resurgence

Beginning in 2005, violence increased as the Taliban reasserted its position with new methods inspired by Iraqi militants. Whereas the Taliban first focused on direct battle with US and NATO forces—a tactic that mostly failed to inflict substantial damage—their use of suicide bombers and buried explosives, known as IEDs (improvised explosive devices), began to cause severe losses. Between January 2005 and August 2006, Afghanistan was subjected to 64 sui‐cide strikes, a strategy that had previously been al‐most unheard in the country's history. At first, there were few casualties, but as training and the avail‐ability of high-powered explosives improved, the death toll began to rise: in one particularly vicious attack in November 2007, at least 70 people were killed, many of them children, as a parliamentary delegation visited the northern town of Baghlan. An explosion at the Indian embassy in Kabul killed more than 50 people less than a year later; the Afghan government accused members of Pakistan's intelli‐gence service of complicity in the attack, which Pak‐istan denied. The emergence of the Taliban coincided with an in‐crease in anti-American and anti-Western attitudes among Afghans. The slow pace of rebuilding, claims of prisoner mistreatment at US detention centers, rampant corruption in the Afghan government, and civilian fatalities as a result of US and NATO bombs fueled such views. In May 2006, a US military vehi‐cle crashed and killed many Afghans, sparking the biggest anti-American protests in Kabul since the war began. Later that year, NATO seized leadership of the battle across the country; American officials stated that the US would play a smaller role and that the conflict's face would become more international. This change reflected the increased demand for US soldiers and resources in Iraq, where sectarianism was at an all-time high. In contrast, the war in Afghanistan was still seen as a relative success in Washington. For commanders on the ground in Afghanistan, however, it was clear that the Taliban intended to ex‐pand its campaign, carrying out more regular as‐saults and increasing its funding from affluent indi‐viduals and organisations in the Persian Gulf. Afghanistan's revived opium economy was another source of revenue. International pressure led the Taliban to restrict poppy planting during their final year in power, but after their departure in 2001, the opium business resurfaced, with earnings support‐ing the insurgency in some regions of the country. Western-backed attempts to discourage poppy growing or encourage farmers to cultivate other crops had little effect; Afghanistan quickly became the source of more than 90 percent of the world's opium. Meanwhile, the US has had relatively little success in killing or arresting Taliban commanders. Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, the Taliban's number three leader, was kidnapped in Pakistan in early 2007, while Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban's senior military commander, was killed in battle with US forces months later. However, those were the exceptions. Top rebel commanders remained at large, many of them in Pakistan's tribal districts bordering Afghanistan. As a result of this fact, the US began targeting rebel commanders in Pakistan with mis‐siles launched from remotely piloted drones. The CIA's targeted killing operation was publicly denied by US authorities but widely known in private. Pakistani officials, for their part, publicly condemned the strikes but secretly approved of them as long as civilian fatalities were kept to a minimum. The US has regularly threatened to expand its drone opera‐tions beyond Pakistan's tribal areas and into regions such as Balochistn if Pakistan does not show greater cooperation in combating the Taliban, a group it has long supported.