Nineteen years ago to the day, President George W. Bush announced what people had been anticipating for weeks: U.S. airstrikes on Al Qaeda and Taliban targets had begun. The United States, Bush said, made clear and unequivocal demands to the Taliban: close down Al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan, hand over Osama Bin Laden, and release all foreign nationals. The Taliban, however, refused all of them.
The U.S. went into Afghanistan seeking to accomplish a mission that was wholly just and legitimate: Destroy the terrorist network that killed 3,000 people on American soil. Having committed the worst act of terrorism in U.S. history, Al Qaeda opened itself up to massive retaliation from the world’s superpower. On the same day U.S. bombers started dropping their payloads on Al Qaeda and Taliban targets, the U.S. State Department sent the Taliban leadership a stern message: “If any person or group connected in any way to Afghanistan conducts a terrorist attack against our country, our forces or those of our friends or allies, our response will be devastating.”
Washington didn’t disappoint. The Taliban was routed from Kabul, Mazari Sharif, Jalalabad, and nearly every other city in Afghanistan in the months that followed. By early 2002, Osama Bin Laden made his escape to Pakistan. Thousands of Al Qaeda foot soldiers were killed. The group’s camps were shuttered. And the same Taliban fighters who once boldly predicted America’s defeat were instead pleading with the new Afghan government for mercy.
Unfortunately, this early success story has long since turned into a geopolitical nightmare for the U.S. It turns out that the U.S. military is far more adept at killing terrorists than being the overlords of an entirely new political system. A mission focused on counterterrorism was, over time, confused with counterinsurgency and nation-building — two overly ambitious tasks the U.S. has never been especially great at. Fresh off their initial success, U.S. policymakers allowed hubristic temptations about what they thought was possible to get in the way of a clean break.
All of a sudden, the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan became less about protecting the U.S. against terrorism and more about protecting an Afghan political elite incapable of surviving on its own. About $2 trillion, more than 2,300 U.S. troop fatalities, and more than 20,000 casualties later, Afghanistan is more famous for opium production and gross corruption than any semblance of decent governance.
If you interviewed U.S. officials responsible for Afghanistan policy 19 years ago, it’s highly unlikely they would have predicted the war dragging on for such a long period of time. And yet here we are, watching as sons and daughters deploy to the same warzone their mothers and fathers fought in years earlier.
The big question everyone, including veterans, is asking: 19 years later, when will the Afghanistan war finally end?
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
