Afghanistan is “the good war”, the one we must continue and escalate, unlike Iraq, which was a mistake and a total disaster.  This was one of the primary messages of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign platform. “We must refocus our efforts on Afghanistan and Pakistan — the central front in our war against al Qaeda — so that we are confronting terrorists where their roots run deepest,” he said in an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine.  The premise was that Afghanistan was a war we needed to fight because it was a direct response to the 9/11 attacks and was the country where Osama bin Laden and his closest confidants were hiding at the time, before they later escaped into Pakistan.  By being tough on Afghanistan, Obama could still rebuke the Bush foreign policy and its horrific invasion of Iraq, while not appearing to be soft on terrorism, a perfect centrist political maneuver. But what was the truth about the war in Afghanistan and was it simply a justified response by the U.S. to the heinous attack that was 9/11 or something more sinister?

To fully understand the context of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, you have to go back a ways to the late 1970s and the Soviet-Afghan war.  In 1978, Afghanistan’s communist party staged a coup and took power, which led to a period of turmoil and instability within the ruling party itself, and eventually the murder of the communist President Nur Muhammad Taraki by the party’s second in command.  This angered the Soviets, who intervened and staged a coup of their own, ousting the new Afghan leader and installing a Soviet loyalist from a rival group. The ensuing Soviet occupation to protect their sock puppet regime incited widespread opposition and various insurgency groups rose up against them, including Islamic guerrilla warriors known as mujahideen, who were most notably led by a young Osama bin Laden.

With the Soviets now bogged down in Afghanistan, the Americans saw an opportunity to intervene in opposition to their Cold War nemesis one more time.  They launched Operation Cyclone, a CIA program to arm and finance the insurgent groups fighting against the Soviets, particularly the mujahideen. Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski explained the strategy in a 1998 interview, saying, “I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’ Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”  The idea was essentially to bankrupt the Soviets by ensuring that they would continue to fight in a no-win quagmire in Afghanistan.

The Soviet Empire did collapse not long after and was forced to withdraw from Afghanistan in defeat in a fashion not unlike America’s withdrawal from Vietnam.  However, the consequences of perpetuating a war that ravaged the country of Afghanistan, led to further civil war throughout the 1990s and the rise of the Taliban, and empowered the bin-Laden-led mujahideen are still being suffered to this day.  Bin Laden’s group would continue to gain influence throughout the 90s as it morphed into al-Qaeda and began conducting terrorist attacks against Americans and American allies and assets in the Middle East, like the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996, and the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.  Brzezinski, however, had dismissed concerns of increased jihadist extremism that resulted from U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in the same interview, saying “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

After 9/11, the U.S. quickly responded by invading Afghanistan and launching airstrikes against Bin Laden and his estimated 400 al-Qaeda members who were hiding out in the caves of Tora Bora in the east of the country.  The Taliban had offered to capture Bin Laden and extradite him to any third party country and they even offered to discuss handing him over to America if it would cease the bombing, but George Bush refused, insisting on instead launching a war that would target not just al-Qaeda, but the Taliban government itself.  In December 2001, the Americans and their coalition of the U.K., Germany, and the Northern Alliance, a militia made up primarily of Uzbeks, Tajiks, and other regional warlords, attempted to capture bin Laden and his friends at Tora Bora.  The ensuing battle killed an estimated 200 al-Qaeda fighters, but bin Laden escaped across the border into Pakistan. The effort was surprisingly half-hearted, as much of the American war effort was already focused on overthrowing the Taliban.  Additionally, the U.S. refused to pursue bin Laden after he “slipped across the border” into Pakistan, an American allied nation, citing a fear of angering Pakistani tribesmen.

Meanwhile, the Americans were able to quickly complete their regime change of the Taliban government in the capital city of Kabul, turning them into an insurgency that the U.S. is still contending with throughout the country to this day.  The war against the Taliban was justified on the grounds that the Taliban had somehow aided and abetted the al-Qaeda terrorists simply due to the fact that they were living in Afghanistan under the Taliban’s rule. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them,” Bush said, implying that the Taliban were every bit as responsible as the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.  However, the Taliban had no known allegiance to al-Qaeda and regularly expressed discontent with bin Laden’s men.  Taliban leader Mullah Omar was quoted as saying about bin Laden, “He’s like a chicken bone caught in my throat. I can’t swallow it or cough it up.”

In place of the Taliban, the Americans helped establish a new government in Kabul and installed Hamid Karzai, who ruled as the president from 2001 through 2014.  The government was made up in large part by factions of the Northern Alliance and many of its warlords had prominent positions within the Karzai administration. Ever since the overthrow of the Taliban, the U.S. has remained in Afghanistan, attempting to prop up its artificially concocted Afghan government and fight off insurgencies from the Taliban and other opposition groups like the Haqqani Network.  The mission is a fool’s errand, an effort to impose the rule of a makeshift government composed of various ethnic groups and warlords and propped up by the American military on a country that is composed of 40 percent ethnic Pashtuns.  The Taliban, who are themselves Pashtuns, still rule much of the country, including the Pashtun-dominant regions, despite not having a piece of the central government. The primary tactic used by the Americans has been counterinsurgency, an exercise in winning hearts and minds and essentially acting as a police force that will protect the Afghan people from the insurgents.  However, in Afghanistan, especially in the major fighting regions like the Helmand and Kandahar provinces, the Taliban insurgents are themselves the friends, family members, and countrymen of the people the Americans are supposedly protecting from them, which renders a counterinsurgency strategy that treats them as enemy combatants completely counterproductive and simply turns the people against the American supposed “protectors” who are fighting and killing their compatriots.

The Afghanistan War, officially named “Operation Enduring Freedom” at its outset, is now the longest U.S. War in history, approaching its 18th birthday later in 2019.  The war has killed over 100,000 people and continues to devastate a destitute third world nation that cannot provide its much of its people with basic necessities, despite all of America’s ambitious nation building efforts, on which the U.S. has spent more than it did on the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe after World War II.  American politicians and media elites justify the war most often by citing the safe-haven myth, the idea that if America ever leaves Afghanistan, it will become a refuge for future terrorists to plot further attacks against the U.S. Although bin Laden and his men were camped out in Afghanistan, the 9/11 attacks were planned in places all over the world.  Certainly, the absence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2001 did not enable the attack and the current presence of America in Afghanistan in no way dissuades terrorists around the world from committing atrocities. To the contrary, U.S. occupation in Afghanistan and all over the Middle East continues to be a primary motivation for ISIS and others who kill innocent civilians and use terrorist tactics, so American intervention is the far greater threat to U.S. national security than some theoretical safe haven in Afghanistan, a landlocked, impoverished nation halfway around the world that cannot possibly threaten the U.S.   

Barack Obama’s escalation of the war after winning the presidency in 2008 and Donald Trump’s continuation of the war after his election in 2016 have perpetuated a policy that has accomplished nothing in almost 18 years, cost countless lives and treasure, and been the epitome of U.S. foreign policy failure in the 21st century.