On Sep 11, 2001, a terrorist attack destroyed the World Trade Centre in New York. Bush blamed al Qaeda, and told the Taleban regime to hand over its chief Osama bin Laden. The Taleban refused to oblige.
A CIA team sent immediately after 9/11 to capture Bin Laden had engaged in negotiations with Taleban leaders. One of the members of the team later told Killid the Taleban were ready to hand over the fugitive al Qaeda chief but wanted him tried by an Islamic tribunal and not in the US. But Bush rejected the request, and instead captured and sent to Guantanamo jail many of those who had been negotiating with the CIA agents before the invasion.
For Arturo Muñoz, who managed counterterrorism programmes at the CIA throughout this period, “instead of honouring Afghan terms of peace … the United States and NATO tried to impose Western ways of doing things.” The most cavalier misstep of all, says Muñoz, was the US opposition to any reconciliation with the Taleban in early December 2001. “A peace process among the Afghans was being discussed at the time, only to be repudiated by the Americans”, he wrote in a chapter of the book ‘The long shadow of 9/11 – America’s response to terrorism’, published in 2011 by the US Rand Corporation, where Muñoz works as Senior Political Scientist after quitting the CIA in 2009.
The US carried out air strikes on Taleban targets in Kabul and Kandahar including the home of Taleban supreme leader Mullah Omar.
US soldiers joined hands with the Northern Alliance to oust the Taleban from Kabul. Hamid Karzai has been president for the last 12 years with the support of the US and its allies who have poured in billions of dollars to fight the Taleban.
War burden
Now foreign troops are withdrawing from the front lines. By next year, security will pass entirely into the hands of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). The war the US started has become an Afghan war that the Afghan people have to fight.
ISAF spokesperson Brig General Heinz Feldmann reiterated at a press conference in Kabul on July 1 that the international forces have had considerable success in meeting goals in Afghanistan. He said the al Qaeda have been weakened and Afghan forces strengthened to take on security responsibilities.
On June 5, ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) commander General Joseph Dunford speaking on the sidelines of a NATO defence ministers meeting in Brussels to a group of Afghan journalists said the conflict has to be ended by Afghans themselves and no “third party” can do it for them.
Dr Faiz Mohammad Zaland, a political analyst, does not agree. Before 2001, conflict in Afghanistan was a civil war. Thereafter Afghanistan has become a battle-field for global jihad. He explained that all sorts of jihadi groups – from the al Qaeda to insurgents from Uzbekistan, Chechnya, Baluchi separatists and Pakistani Taleban – have entered Afghanistan.
The war is not only against the Taleban, he says. “Many insurgent groups are involved … (the war) has many international dimensions,” he adds.
Why has the war intensified?
There was relative peace in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2004. The situation worsened gradually thereafter.
Zubair Shafiqi, a political analyst and editor-in-chief of Weesa daily, says the international forces aligned with the Northern Alliance, sworn rivals of the Taleban, to hound and capture the scattered fighters. Also, Taleban who had come out of madrasas with the support of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence in 1994 were again clandestinely assisted to regroup and reorganise to take on the US-led NATO.
Shafiqi accuses the “internationals” of keeping the war going. He cites the recent skirmish in Jawzjan between forces loyal to General Rashid Dostum and the provincial governor Mohammad Alam Sayee. The governor said Dostum who is the chairman of the armed forces joint chiefs of staff had distributed arms to his supporters.
Western agenda
Political analyst Miagul Waseq who has been studying the situation since 2001 wonders how the US can claim to have mostly fulfilled its goals in Afghanistan. The situation is far from stable at present, and security has deteriorated since 2001, he observes.
Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs in 2011, but Bush’s so-called “war on terror” has not made the world safer or reined in al Qaeda. Afghanistan remains on top of the list of global narcotic producers and traffickers, he says.
Ghulam Jilani Zwak, head of Afghanistan Research and Advisory Center, observes the US wants to achieve its so-called goals with “no loss (of life)” while leaving Afghanistan to shoulder all the responsibility of providing security.
He believes the US wants to maintain a military presence in the region to “watch and control” China which is its biggest competitor. Even if Sep 11 had not happened, he insists, the US would have found a reason to be in the region.
