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War in Afghanistan (2001–2021)

2001 conflict between NATO Western forces and the Taliban

The War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) (or the US War in Afghanistan or the Afghanistan War), code named Operation Enduring Freedom (2001–14) and Operation Freedom's Sentinel (2015–2021), followed the United States invasion of Afghanistan of 7 October 2001, when the United States of America and its allies successfully drove the Taliban from power in order to deny al-Qaeda a safe base of operations in Afghanistan. Since the initial objectives were completed, a coalition of over 40 countries (including all NATO members) formed a security mission in the country.

The Taliban has been given the opportunity to surrender all the terrorists in Afghanistan and to close down their camps and operations. Full warning has been given, and time is running out. ~ George W. Bush
Americans were proud to see the images of Afghans- including women- holding up their purple-stained fingers as they went to the polls to "elect" their new government. Democracy had arrived in Afghanistan! Girls were going to school, women were working in government jobs, and religious fanatics were relegated to the hinterlands of the country. Except, as I saw firsthand in 2011- and the world saw ten years later, in the summer of 2021- it was all a mirage. None of it was real; it was a house of cards, destined to collapse. ~ Pete Hegseth

Quotes

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You know who did not miss the mark? The Taliban. They knew exactly who their people were, their root causes were clear, they were nothing if not sustainable, and they had legitimacy we could never manufacture. ~ Pete Hegseth
 
After US troops have withdrawn from Afghanistan, Europe must define its own security interests more clearly. It has been seen that America is no longer unconditionally ready to take on a leadership role anywhere in the world. ~ Angela Merkel
 
It was not clear how to get at al-Qaida in a way to destroy al-Qaida, and we were not prepared, before 9/11, to take down the Taliban. ~ Colin Powell
 
It's crazy that you have this today … Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara … They were all ready to buy in to the process … to work under the king's banner for an ethnically balanced Afghanistan. ~ Abdul Haq
 
If the Taliban is given evidence that Osama bin Laden is involved we would be ready to hand him over to a third country. ~ Haji Abdul Kabir
 
Maybe, just maybe, our children and grandchildren will not have to fight there again, but as Plato said... "Only the dead have seen the end of war." ~ Patrick O'Kelley
 
Despite almost continuous combat since the invasion of October 2001, pacification efforts have failed to curtail the Taliban insurgency, largely because the US simply could not control the swelling surplus from the country’s heroin trade. Its opium production surged from around 180 tonnes in 2001 to more than 3,000 tonnes a year after the invasion, and to more than 8,000 by 2007. Every spring, the opium harvest fills the Taliban’s coffers once again, funding wages for a new crop of guerrilla fighters. ~ Alfred W. McCoy
 
'Iron Knights' of 1st Battalion, 66th Armor Regiment on patrol in Arghandab District, 2011

2001

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  • Despite efforts by the Taliban to disrupt these critical aid shipments, we will deliver food and seeds, vaccines and medicines by truck, and even by draft animals. Conditions permitting, we will bring help directly to the people of Afghanistan by air drops.
  • The United States, supported by many nations, is bringing justice to the terrorists in Afghanistan. We're making progress against military _targets, and that is our objective. Unlike the enemy, we seek to minimize, not maximize, the loss of innocent life. I'm proud of the honorable conduct of the American military. And my country grieves for all the suffering the Taliban have brought upon Afghanistan, including the terrible burden of war. The Afghan people do not deserve their present rulers. Years of Taliban misrule have brought nothing but misery and starvation. Even before this current crisis, 4 million Afghans depended on food from the United States and other nations, and millions of Afghans were refugees from Taliban oppression. I make this promise to all the victims of that regime: The Taliban's days of harboring terrorists and dealing in heroin and brutalizing women are drawing to a close. And when that regime is gone, the people of Afghanistan will say with the rest of the world, "Good riddance."
  • I can promise, too, that America will join the world in helping the people of Afghanistan rebuild their country. Many nations, including mine, are sending food and medicine to help Afghans through the winter. America has airdropped over 1.3 million packages of rations into Afghanistan. Just this week, we airlifted 20,000 blankets and over 200 tons of provisions into the region. We continue to provide humanitarian aid, even while the Taliban try to steal the food we send.
  • "Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age" was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals... But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age.
    • Christopher Hitchens, "Christopher Hitchens on why peace-lovers must welcome this war", The Mirror, 15 November 2001
  • Their [antiwar movement] mantra was: "Afghanistan, where the world's richest country rains bombs on the world's poorest country." Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, "Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one"? "Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women." "Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones." "Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime." I could go on.

2002

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  • Huey: So Colonel, you guys aren’t dropping food anymore? What happened to all that concern about the starving Afghan people?
Pentagon: Yeah, well…they’re not, uh, starving anymore.
Huey: Is that right?
Pentagon: Yep. Hey told us they’re all full now. Couldn’t eat another bite.
Huey: Amazing, I wonder what was in those food packets.
Pentagon: Well, that’s classified but…let’s just say a Snickers really satisfies…

2004

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  • The report drawn up by the commission's staff said: "From the spring of 1997 to September 2001, the US government tried to persuade the Taliban to expel Bin Laden to a country where he could face justice. The efforts employed inducements, warnings and sanctions. All these efforts failed."
    At a meeting of the Bush administration's top national security officials on September 10, a three-phase strategy was agreed.
    The Taliban would be presented with a final ultimatum to hand over Bin Laden. Failing that, covert military aid would be channeled to anti-Taliban groups. If both those options failed, "the deputies agreed that the United States would seek to overthrow the Taliban regime through more direct action."
  • We did not take into account during that period the kind of actions we were prepared to follow after 9/11, tt was not clear how to get at al-Qaida in a way to destroy al-Qaida, and we were not prepared, before 9/11, to take down the Taliban. [...] President Bush and his entire national security team understood that terrorism had to be among our highest priorities, and it was.
  • A retired army colonel commissioned by the Pentagon to examine the war in Afghanistan concluded the conflict created conditions that have given "warlordism, banditry and opium production a new lease on life," The New Yorker reported on Sunday.
    • Hy Rothstein, The New Yorker, (Sunday, 3 April 2004); as quoted in Channel news Asia archived from the original on (2004-04-05).

2010

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See also: Operation Moshtarak

2011

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2016

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2017

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2018

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  • The Afghan war is still in progress close to twenty years in. For perspective, Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of France, crowned himself emperor, defeated four European coalitions against him, invaded Russia, lost, was defeated and exiled, returned, and was defeated and exiled a second time, all in less time than the United States has spent trying to turn Afghanistan into a stable country.
    • Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018)
  • After fighting the longest war in its history, the US stands at the brink of defeat in Afghanistan. How could this be possible? How could the world’s sole superpower have battled continuously for more than 16 years – deploying more than 100,000 troops at the conflict’s peak, sacrificing the lives of nearly 2,300 soldiers, spending more than $1tn (£740bn) on its military operations, lavishing a record $100bn more on “nation-building”, helping fund and train an army of 350,000 Afghan allies – and still not be able to pacify one of the world’s most impoverished nations?
  • For over a decade after the fall of the Taliban regime in December 2001, China preferred to be a mere spectator of the dramatic events unfolding in Afghanistan. Unlike other countries, which sent troops to participate in counterinsurgency operations and contributed financial and other support for reconstruction of the war-ravaged country, Beijing maintained a low profile.
    China did not send troops to Afghanistan as it was not interested in being a “subordinate partner” of the U.S.-led alliance in that country. Besides, its goals in Afghanistan were “limited,” Zhao Huasheng, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai pointed out. Unlike the Western powers, China was not interested in “rebuilding Afghanistan politically” or in altering its “political structures, social patterns or ideological orientations.”
    While China avoided participating in multilateral efforts in Afghanistan in the 2002-12 period, it maintained close ties with the Afghan government. It signed the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Good Neighborly Relations with Kabul in 2006. Two years later, Chinese companies won a $3 billion contract to extract copper from the Mes Aynak mines in Logar province.
    It was in the context of the U.S. drawdown of troops from Afghanistan and the possibility of the country descending into chaos that China began stepping up its involvement in Afghan affairs in 2012.

2020

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  • I put the uniform away. I didn't talk about my experiences except with other Veterans. I didn't join the VFW, the American Legion, or any of the war protests that were still happening. I just wanted to be left alone and get busy with life. I was proud of my service even though the country didn't seem to be proud of us. I remember when I heard the news that Saigon had fallen. I was a Missouri State Trooper by then and I had to pull over to the road shoulder and stop. I kept wondering, "Why?" All those lives, all the wounded. America: two wins, one tie, one loss.
    Later, at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, I remember watching the "Welcome Home" shows. I got teary-eyed watching the surprise visits by soldiers to their kids' schools and the excitement in the families' eyes when they saw them. That is what homecomings are supposed to be like. I remember welcoming my Marine Corps son home from Afghanistan (twice), my sailor son came home after a deployment to the Middle East on the carrier, George H.W. Bush. I remember all the Patriot Guard missions to welcome home servicemen and women. I also remember the PGR missions for the KIAs (killed in action). Lives ended too soon.
    Less than 9% of the population has ever served in the military, around 3% have ever served in combat. Too many people are too wrapped up in the Kardashians, Miley Cyrus, iPhones, tweets, fashion, or just daily life to consider the Veterans and active duty military. Next time you see someone wearing a Veteran ball cap or uniform, thank them for serving. They will appreciate it.
    • Gary Baker, as quoted by William F. Brown in Our Vietnam Wars, Volume 4: As Told By More Veterans Who Served (2020), hardcover, p. 271-272
  • Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick, is trying to prolong her father's endless war in Afghanistan. You would think that every Democrat would be united in opposing such a policy, right? Well, you would be wrong. It’s not every day that you wake up in your blue state and learn that one of your newly elected Democratic congresspeople is joining with a Cheney to try to prolong the longest war in American history. But that’s what happened this week, when Colorado's freshman Democratic Rep. Jason Crow teamed up with Republican Rep. Liz Cheney to advance legislation that would make it more difficult for any president to draw down troop deployments in Afghanistan. I live in the same media market as Crow's district. I can tell you that his 2018 campaign was focused on gun control. It was not a campaign promising voters that he would go to Washington to make common cause with Liz Cheney, and help her efforts to glorify and fortify her daddy's policy of endless war. But that’s exactly what his bill does. [...] Cheney initiatives that may seem superficially reasonable when calmly uttered by a Cheney usually have an insane ulterior motive. In this case, that truism applies: The Crow-Cheney legislation may sound like it includes reasonable requests, but they are designed to make the Afghanistan deployment permanent. In practice, nobody can predict with 100 percent certainty what will ensue once a nineteen-year military occupation ends. What we can know is that it’s a bad idea to continue a policy that isn’t working — and there’s plenty of evidence that it isn’t.

2021

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Main article: 2021 Taliban offensive
  • After US troops have withdrawn from Afghanistan, Europe must define its own security interests more clearly. It has been seen that America is no longer unconditionally ready to take on a leadership role anywhere in the world.
  • When I finished writing this book the first time, in 2014, the United States was still involved in Iraq and the "Forever War" of Afghanistan. I was too old to go to war anymore, but I sent my Junior ROTC cadets off each year. The "Forever War" went on, with no end in sight, but amazingly President Trump put a plan in place to get us out of Afghanistan. When President Biden took over the job in the Oval Office, he decided to do his own plan, which turned out to be a disastrous withdrawal, that was compared to how the United States left Vietnam. But now, as of the re-release of this book in 2021, we are no longer involved in any wars in the Middle East.
    Maybe, just maybe, our children and grandchildren will not have to fight there again, but as Plato said... "Only the dead have seen the end of war."
    • Patrick O'Kelley, Triple Canopy: A Warrior's Journey From Grenada to Iraq (2014), October 2021 republishing, Fayetteville: Blacksmith Publishing, paperback, p. 543

Post-war (2022-)

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By the time the frantic airlift from Kabul began, top State Department officials “had not made clear decisions” regarding which Afghans would be eligible for evacuation, nor where they would be taken.
It also says that the department “failed” to establish a broad Afghanistan task force as the situation there deteriorated in late July and early August 2021, and that such a step “would have brought key players together to address issues related to a possible” mass evacuations. ~ Michael Crowley
 
The report says its review team “was struck by the differences in style and decision making” between the Trump and Biden administrations, “most notably the relative lack of an interagency process in the Trump administration and the intense interagency process that characterized the initial period of the Biden administration.”
“This included a particular focus very early in the Biden administration on the fate of those eligible” for American visas and assistance, which the report says led to “successful” early steps to address a huge backlog of Afghans who had begun requesting to leave the country. “That movement, however, was still in its early days as Kabul fell to the Taliban,” the reports finds. ~ Michael Crowley
  • During the writing of this book, America's two-decade war in Afghanistan came to an inglorious end. After thousands of lives lost, and trillions of dollars spent, the Islamist Taliban are back in charge. It's a humbling, if illuminating, reality. Like most Americans, I was eager for "the folks who knocked those buildings down, to hear all of us soon," as President George W. Bush said atop the rubble of the World Trade Center in 2001. American military might quickly toppled the Taliban, and Al Qaeda scurried into Pakistan. What followed was a nineteen-year experiment in Afghanistan, during which I had a front-row seat.
    • Pete Hegseth, Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation (2022), New York: Broadside Books, p. 54-55
  • Americans were proud to see the images of Afghans- including women- holding up their purple-stained fingers as they went to the polls to "elect" their new government. Democracy had arrived in Afghanistan! Girls were going to school, women were working in government jobs, and religious fanatics were relegated to the hinterlands of the country. Except, as I saw firsthand in 2011- and the world saw ten years later, in the summer of 2021- it was all a mirage. None of it was real; it was a house of cards, destined to collapse.
    Why? Conventional answers abound: the Afghan Army was built in the image of the American Army, unable to operate effectively without air support. Or the Afghan government was irredeemably corrupt and beholden to Western aid. Or, my personal favorite, "the Americans have the watches, but we [the Taliban] have the time"- American political will was destined to break. (Osama bin Laden did predict as much.) All of these explanations touch on aspects of America's failure, but none explain the deeper reason. For two decades of work to collapse in two weeks, something more fundamental was at play.
    • Pete Hegseth, Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation (2022), New York: Broadside Books, p. 55
  • When I served in Afghanistan, my job- as a counterinsurgency instructor- was to study the insurgency, meaning the Taliban. In short, we taught both Americans and Afghans that they needed to know the terrain, especially the human terrain. Who is our enemy? What motivates them? And how to they leverage and/or exploit the population? From there, we looked at the "root causes" of population grievances that our enemy was experiencing. Finally, our job was to find sustainable solutions that advanced the legitimacy of the Afghan Army, police, and government. Know the human terrain, identify root causes for problems, find sustainable solutions, and legitimize our allies. It sounded great, and I knew how to teach the hell out of it.
    But, as it turns out, we always missed the mark on all aspects of what we taught. You know who did not miss the mark? The Taliban. They knew exactly who their people were, their root causes were clear, they were nothing if not sustainable, and they had legitimacy we could never manufacture.
    • Pete Hegseth, Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation (2022), New York: Broadside Books, p. 55-56
  • Ideas like religious freedom, freedom of speech, natural rights, and equal justice are the exception in human history, not the rule. They were gifted to us by previous generations. So, when we attempt to replace core aspects of Afghan paideia with our own over just two decades (a blip in human history), it is doomed to fail. If anything, it only strengthens the Afghan paideia- fortifying their belief in the supremacy of their system.
    • Pete Hegseth, Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation (2022), New York: Broadside Books, p. 56-57
  • Biden officials have long said that few envisioned such a rapid Taliban takeover of the country, that exiting under any circumstances would have been difficult, and that the United States made the right strategic decision to withdraw.
    The report does not pin blame on specific individuals and mentions Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken only in passing. But it does say that in both the Trump and Biden administrations, “there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow.”
    Even after it became clear that the Taliban would capture Kabul, the report says, the department’s response featured confusion about responsibilities and authorities. Under Mr. Blinken, the State Department’s participation in executive branch planning for an evacuation “was hindered by the fact that it was unclear who in the department had the lead,” the report finds.
    Another shortcoming: By the time the frantic airlift from Kabul began, top State Department officials “had not made clear decisions” regarding which Afghans would be eligible for evacuation, nor where they would be taken.
    It also says that the department “failed” to establish a broad Afghanistan task force as the situation there deteriorated in late July and early August 2021, and that such a step “would have brought key players together to address issues related to a possible” mass evacuations.
  • At the same time, the 87-page report — less than half of which was publicly released on Friday because much of it is classified — points to several factors largely beyond the Biden administration’s control to explain the chaos that followed the government’s collapse and does not directly condemn the Biden administration.
    It says, as Biden officials have many times before, that the coronavirus pandemic severely limited operations at the U.S. Embassy in the months ahead of the withdrawal, making it difficult to process special visas for Afghans hoping to leave the country ahead of the Taliban’s return. The report also suggests that the Trump administration had committed to withdrawing troops from Afghanistan after a 20-year occupation without planning for how the United States might maintain a diplomatic presence in the country and what to do about the tens of thousands of Afghans who, fearing Taliban reprisals, had applied for those special visas.
    The report says its review team “was struck by the differences in style and decision making” between the Trump and Biden administrations, “most notably the relative lack of an interagency process in the Trump administration and the intense interagency process that characterized the initial period of the Biden administration.”
    “This included a particular focus very early in the Biden administration on the fate of those eligible” for American visas and assistance, which the report says led to “successful” early steps to address a huge backlog of Afghans who had begun requesting to leave the country. “That movement, however, was still in its early days as Kabul fell to the Taliban,” the reports finds.

See also

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