Afghanistan, a landlocked central Asian nation slightly smaller than Texas, has a 5,000 year history as one of the cradles of early civilization. The nation of 30 million has been at the crossroads of invading armies from ancient conquerors such as Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan to modern armies such as the British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 1980s.
Although most people tend to think that it was the Soviet invasion that set the groundwork for what would become the American war in Afghanistan, the CIA was heavily involved in Afghanistan before the first Soviet troops marched in. In 1978, during Jimmy Carters administration, Afghan communists pulled off a successful coup, replacing a leftwing, but moderate, government. Armed Muslim resistance provided the CIA with an opportunity to battle the communists through a proxy war. After the U.S. ambassador was killed in 1979, Carter gave the green light to more aggressive CIA operations in the country.
But the CIA cold war became a hot war when the Soviets invaded the country on December 24, 1979. For the next ten years the CIA backed the Mujahideen (Arabic for freedom-fighter), a ragtag group of Afghan insurgents who were supported and reinforced by volunteer Islamic fighters from many countries. The Mujahideen also got millions in aid and arms from U.S. intelligence. Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and the fall of the Afghan Communist government three years later, the country devolved into a bitter civil war.
It was in this chaos that a young fundamentalist Pashtun religious leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, founded an armed resistance group of Pashtun religious students and named them the Taliban (student). He set about to impose an extreme interpretation of Islamic law on Afghan society. In 1994, the Taliban defeated some local warlords in a series of pitched battles. And they installed their unrelenting version of Islam in the towns they captured. For many Afghans, especially those in the rural regions, who had lived in abject poverty and suffering for more than a decade of invasion and civil war, the stability and order offered by the Taliban was welcome. With significant help from Pakistan, the Taliban captured Kandahar in late 1994 and began their assault of Kabul in January 1995. Twenty-months later, in September 2006, after bitter fighting with anti-Taliban forces, they captured the country's capital. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates were the only countries to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistans legitimate government.
The same year the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, who had been running the terror organization al Qaeda from the Sudan, was forced to move after the Clinton administration pressured the Sudanese to expel the terror leader. Bin Laden, with his top advisors, moved to an isolated encampment in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province. With the Taliban as Islamic ideological soul mates, bin Laden had found safe haven.
Following the 1998 terrorist bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the U.S. launched cruise missiles at Afghanistan-based al Qaeda training camps. But it didn't slow al Qaeda. Bin Laden's forces joined the Taliban to fight against the Northern Alliance--a group of normally competitive tribes--who had put aside their historical differences in order to fight the Taliban. On September 9, 2001, the charismatic Northern Alliance commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was killed by two al Qaeda dispatched operatives who posed as journalists. Two days later, al Qaeda carried out its attacks in America on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The war in Afghanistan officially began on October 7, 2001 with air strikes on Taliban and al Qaeda targets. Simultaneously, American, British and some Allied special forces worked with the Northern Alliance and began a ground offensive to destabilize the Taliban. The Taliban fled Kabul on November 13, five weeks after the war had begun. In December, in the battle for Tora Bora, a cave complex in Afghanistan's White Mountains, U.S. forces initially cornered Osama bin Laden, but he escaped.
Al Qaeda and the Taliban retreated toward the desolate mountainous border with Pakistan, a large region where there is little central government control.
In December, 2001, the Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-Establishment of Permanent Government Institutions (the Bonn Agreement) brought together dozens of prominent Afghans from different tribes and helped convene the country's first national government since 1979. Hamid Karzai, a long-time Pashtun political activist from a patrician Kandahar family, was appointed interim president.
While Karzai went about establishing a new government, the Taliban made the strategic decision to temporarily avoid conflict with the new Afghan army and the remaining U.S. and Allied troops. Instead, starting in 2002, the Taliban slowly rebuilt its forces, mostly with help from sympathetic tribes and fundamentalists across the Pakistani border. By 2005, the Taliban was strong enough to restart its military campaign, and through 2007 steadily adapted attacks honed by terrorists and insurgents in Iraq, with the frequent issue of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and suicide bombers.
In the spring of 2008, the Taliban launched large, coordinated, and often effective attacks on coalition and Afghan forces. By the summer, more non-U.S. coalition soldiers had died in Afghanistan than in the Iraq War. During the last several years of his administration, George W. Bush focused more on Iraq than Afghanistan, leading to charges that he was ignoring the war in Afghanistan. When Obama became president he heeded the demands of U.S. military commanders who wanted more resources. Within two months of taking office he increased the number of troops by 20,000. Later, after an exhaustive review (which administration critics like Dick Cheney castigated as dilatory), Obama decided to increase troop levels by another 30,000. In late May, 2010, the Senate approved $33 billion to cover the costs of the increase. That was on top of another $4 billion for the State Department for a so-called "civilian surge" designed to win over Afghans by improving their lives. All of this funding was in addition to the $130 billion already approved by Congress for the war in 2010. Although it did approve the president's request for additional funds, the Senate voted 80-18 to reject his demand for a timetable for bringing the forces home.
Meanwhile, as the war grinds on, the underlying question of whether the U.S. can do nation building in Afghanistan and help the country modernize remains unanswered. History suggests the complexity of the challenge. Nick Cullather, an American history professor, examined a 1946 project to build an enormous dam in Helmand Province in southwest Afghanistan. Although the primary benefit was expected to be a vast expansion of farmland in an otherwise arid portion of the country, it was hoped that the project would help create a middle class, provide political stability, and even generate needed tax revenue to help the central government tackle other infrastructure projects.
But three years after the project started, it was already in serious trouble. Yet it stumbled along for another 30 years, leaving the farmers who were supposed to be the beneficiaries, worse off than when it all began.
Cullather believes that the U.S. is doomed to repeat its past failures in this new round of nation building: "Proponents of a fresh nation-building venture in Afghanistan, unaware of the results of the last one, have resurrected its imaginings. Supporters justify development aid to the new Pashtun-led government in Kabul as a form of international social control. It will provide a buffer against terrorism and 'prevent future Osama bin Ladens from arising.' The centerpiece of the modernization effort, a writer for the New York Times suggests, should be 'dams to provide water for irrigation.'"
By 2010 the American people had lost confidence in the war, with a majority of 67% convinced that it was a stalemate. By April 2010 a Washington Post poll found that a majority had concluded that "the war in Afghanistan is not worth its costs."
