War in Afghanistan
After the terrorist group al Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, the American military was sent to Afghanistan to attack the Taliban, and destroy their governing position. The Taliban became the target of the U.S. because they had allowed Osama bin Laden to use their country as a training ground for terrorist activities directed against the United States. However, the U.S. is now bogged down in what seems to be an unwinnable war against Taliban insurgents that cross the border from Pakistan. Moreover, there are militants in Afghanistan who object to foreign troops being in their country, and they have apparently joined with the insurgents and continue fighting the American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. This paper reviews the historical and contemporary causes of the war in Afghanistan, and critiques the positive outcomes as well as the negative outcomes of the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan.
How American Became Involved in Afghanistan
Following the events of September 11, 2001 -- the attacks on the World Trade Center, on the Pentagon, and the failed hijacking that led to the crash of a commercial jetliner in Pennsylvania -- the George W. Bush Administration made plans to use force against the ruling government of Afghanistan, the Taliban. Less than a month after the September 11 attacks on the United States -- on October 7, 2001 -- American forces began a massive assault on the Taliban's fortifications, on villages where the Taliban were suspected of hiding out, and on other targets. The U.S. dropped bombs from B-52 planes and attacked sites where the U.S. suspected there were Taliban officials. And according to professor Marc Herold (University of New Hampshire) those attacks also killed between 3,000 and 3,400 civilians between October 7, 2001, through March, 2002 (Herold, 2002, p. 1).
Herold, whose reports were based on articles in the Pakistan Observer, the Guardian, the Times of India and other journalists, asserts on his Web site that the U.S. strategy in those first months of the war was to bomb no matter that civilian lives "…be sacrificed" -- and he points to the bombing of the Kajakai dam and addition power stations, the bombing of radio stations, telephone offices, and "trucks and busses filled with fleeing refugees" (Herold, p. 3).
Notwithstanding the terrible loss of life that may have resulted unintentionally from the attacks, the U.S. did succeed in either destroying Taliban operations or driving their principal leaders across the border into Pakistan. Amir Taheri writes in the peer-reviewed journal American Foreign Policy Interests that the United Nations had "endorsed" the American war in Afghanistan as a temporary campaign to attack those that had attacked the United States. And by attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan the Americans had three key interests, Taheri explains.
The first interest was to show "friend and foe alike that it could not be attacked with impunity" (Taheri, 2009, 365). It is worth mentioning that the U.S. had been attacked before, including the "mass murder of 241 Marines in Beirut" in 1983, and the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, but the U.S. "…had not hit back in ways that might have dissuaded future aggressors," Taheri explains (365). Hence, it was important to make a loud and forceful statement the America would not cower in the face of assaults from terrorists.
The second interest that was served by the invasion of Afghanistan was, as mentioned, to find and destroy the bases from which the terrorists trained to attack America on September 11, 2001. Thirdly, Taheri continues, the U.S. wanted to help the Afghanistan people replace the Taliban with a government that suited American desires to see democracy thrive in this third world country.
Taheri points out that by 2005, America had achieved all the objectives mentioned previously, and was in a position to "declare victory in Afghanistan and start to reduce its military footprint in preparation for disengagement" (366). However, The Bush Administration did not want to simply walk away from Afghanistan. Bush believed the public saw it as "the good war" while the war in Iraq was being perceived as "the bad war" -- partly because the rhetoric used by Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq, the presence of "weapons of mass destruction" were nowhere to be found, Taheri, 366.
A second reason why Bush did not want to pull out of Afghanistan was that the "enterprise had developed a momentum of its own" and that momentum raised a series of potential "objectives that had little or no relation" to the national interests of the United States, Taheri continues (366). Those objectives included: a) destroying...
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