U.S. War in Afghanistan: Causes, Outcomes, and Analysis

Introduction

After the terrorist group al-Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, the American military was sent to Afghanistan to assault 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. soon became mired in what appeared to be an unwinnable war against Taliban insurgents crossing the border from Pakistan. Moreover, militants inside Afghanistan who objected to the presence of foreign troops apparently joined with those insurgents and continued fighting American and NATO forces. This paper reviews the historical and contemporary causes of the war in Afghanistan, and critiques both the positive and negative outcomes of U.S. engagement there.

How America 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 October 7, 2001, American forces began a massive assault on Taliban 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 struck sites where Taliban officials were suspected to be located. According to professor Marc Herold, those attacks killed between 3,000 and 3,400 civilians between October 7, 2001, and March 2002 (Herold, 2002, p. 1).

Herold, whose reports drew on articles in the Pakistan Observer, The Guardian, The Times of India, and other outlets, asserts that the U.S. strategy in those first months of the war was to bomb regardless of whether civilian lives "be sacrificed." He points to the bombing of the Kajakai dam and additional power stations, the bombing of radio stations and telephone offices, and attacks on "trucks and buses filled with fleeing refugees" (Herold, p. 3).

Notwithstanding the terrible loss of life that may have resulted unintentionally from those 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 against those who had attacked the United States. By attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Americans pursued 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, p. 365). It is worth noting 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 had "not hit back in ways that might have dissuaded future aggressors" (Taheri, p. 365). It was therefore important to make a forceful statement that America would not cower in the face of terrorist assaults.

The second interest served by the invasion of Afghanistan was to find and destroy the bases from which the terrorists had trained to attack America on September 11, 2001. Third, Taheri continues, the U.S. wanted to help the Afghan people replace the Taliban with a government that reflected American desires to see democracy take hold in this developing country.

Taheri points out that by 2005, America had achieved all of these objectives and was in a position to "declare victory in Afghanistan and start to reduce its military footprint in preparation for disengagement" (p. 366). However, the Bush administration did not want to simply walk away from Afghanistan. Bush believed the public viewed it as "the good war," while the war in Iraq was being perceived as "the bad war" — partly because the "weapons of mass destruction" used to justify the Iraq invasion were nowhere to be found (Taheri, p. 366).

A second reason why Bush did not pull out of Afghanistan was that the "enterprise had developed a momentum of its own," raising a series of potential objectives that had "little or no relation" to U.S. national interests (Taheri, p. 366). Those objectives included: (a) destroying the opium trade; (b) reviving Afghan agriculture; (c) improving the status of women and increasing school enrollment for children; and (d) launching a "Western-style judiciary" (Taheri, p. 366).

Taheri argues that while the initial involvement in Afghanistan was a laudable objective — with a "realistic chance of being achieved" — the goals Bush envisioned after the Taliban had been largely driven across the border into Pakistan were goals "no outsider could hope to attain" (p. 367).

The Ramifications and Analysis of Bush's War on Terror

An important part of the historical context of the Bush administration's decision to attack the Taliban in Afghanistan is an understanding of the broader picture Bush attempted to project to the world. In his inauguration speech, Bush was "trying to rally the nation to a spiritual revitalization through a collective attack on sin" (Chernus, 2004, p. 415). His speech established the precedent that faith-based organizations — particularly conservative Christian organizations that had helped elect Bush — would receive "billions of federal dollars" through his policies, benefiting "the Republican party and especially its conservative wing" (Chernus, p. 416). This was part of Bush's "compassionate conservatism" — until September 11. From the moment the World Trade Center's towers fell, Bush's rhetorical theme shifted from a religious rallying cry to a call to "stand together to win the war against terrorism" (Chernus, p. 417).

The Bush "War on Terrorism" thus became, in effect, a war against evil — an "apocalyptic crusade against sin" — and it became his passion to justify all-out military engagement against not only terrorism but against any nation that harbored or supported terrorists (Chernus, p. 418). If this crusade was to be a "global war of faith against sin, [then] supporting U.S. policies had to become the test of any religion's virtue and truth," Chernus explains (p. 418).

The "logical corollary" Chernus identifies in Bush's post-9/11 moral fervor is that "all opposition to U.S. policies had to constitute sin"; America was the country on God's side because God had a "special affiliation with and providence for the American way of life" (Chernus, p. 420). To summarize what Bush was conveying to the world as the U.S. prepared to bomb suspected Taliban positions in Afghanistan, Chernus asserts that the president presented "a distinct image of a nation carrying compassion in one hand and violent justice in the other." Bush told a public prayer service: "This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger." Furthermore, the U.S. would have "no compassion for any state that sponsors [terrorists]" (Chernus, p. 424). This framing, of course, applied directly to Afghanistan and to Pakistan.

Conclusion

While Obama inherited this war from Bush — who probably should have withdrawn troops once the Taliban had been driven out of power and the original goals achieved — it ultimately became Obama's war to manage. His decision to announce a withdrawal by 2014 was prudent, but the more pressing question was why U.S. forces should remain that long at all. With over 100,000 NATO and U.S. troops in the country, Afghanistan remained clearly vulnerable to attack. With a seemingly unlimited stream of radicals, insurgents, and militants crossing the porous Afghan-Pakistani border, the continued mission no longer justified the loss of additional American and NATO lives.

Works Cited

Associated Press. (2011). Suicide bombers kill worshippers in Afghanistan. Retrieved November 2011, from http://www.npr.com.

This article brought to light the ongoing violence in Afghanistan — specifically the continued use of suicide bombers, in this case killing fellow Muslims as they left a mosque following worship services. The incident underscored that the NATO and U.S. presence in Afghanistan could not prevent terrorists from striking wherever and whenever they chose.

Baktash, H., & Magnier, M. (2011). Suicide bombing in Kabul kills as many as 13 Americans. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved November 19, 2011, from http://www.latimes.com.

The thirteen Americans killed in Kabul on October 28 were riding in an armored military bus when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives. The reporters quoted a United Nations spokesperson who stated that violence in Afghanistan "is at its worst since the war started in 2001."

Chernus, I. (2004). George W. Bush's war on terrorism and sin. Political Theology, 5(4), 411–430.

This scholarly article examines in detail how George W. Bush began his presidency seeking to direct federal funds toward conservative Christian organizations, and how, after 9/11, he launched a very different kind of crusade. His "War on Terrorism" effectively framed America as the nation on God's side, casting any country harboring terrorists as evil.

Herold, M. W. (2002). A dossier on civilian victims of United States' aerial bombing of Afghanistan: A comprehensive accounting. Retrieved November 18, 2011, from http://cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm.

Though not peer-reviewed, Herold draws on reasonably reliable sources to document the number of Afghan civilians killed during America's initial bombing campaigns.

Manfredi, F. (2008). Rethinking U.S. policy in Afghanistan. World Policy Institute, 25(4), 23–30.

Manfredi's scholarly piece criticizes the war in Afghanistan, arguing that Afghan people viewed NATO and American troops as "an affront to the traditional spirit of independence." He characterizes the country as deeply corrupt and urges withdrawal.

Mazhar, M. S., Goraya, N. S., & Kataria, J. R. (2011). War against terrorism: Implications for Pakistan. Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business, 3(3), 270–282.

This article is useful because it critiques the U.S. use of drone strikes — and the civilian casualties they produce — while also examining the strategy of paying Pakistan billions of dollars to pursue the Taliban on its own soil, a strategy the authors view as largely unsuccessful.

Roggio, B. (2011). U.S. drones kill 6 "militants" in al-Qaeda hub of Datta Khel. The Long War Journal. Retrieved November 20, 2011, from http://www.longwarjournal.org.

Roggio's report covers drone strikes against suspected militants in North Waziristan, Pakistan.

Taheri, A. (2009). Afghanistan. American Foreign Policy Interests, 31(6), 364–375.

Taheri provides specific and useful detail on how the U.S. became mired in Afghanistan. He argues that Bush had accomplished all initial goals by 2005 but, instead of leaving Afghanistan to the Afghans, chose to pursue nation-building — a mission that ultimately proved unachievable.

The Hindu. (2011). U.S. drones kill 20 in Pakistan. Retrieved November 20, 2011, from

Journalist Anita Joshua reports on an American drone strike in the tribal region of Pakistan.

Zakheim, D. S. (2011). What 9/11 has wrought. Middle East Quarterly, 18(4), 1–11.

Zakheim offers a detailed review of how the world changed after 9/11, including how the U.S. lifted sanctions on Pakistan once it needed Pakistani cooperation against the Taliban. The article provides an objective overview of how 9/11 reshaped American thinking about enemies, terrorism, and alliances.