Afghanistan, War in

American-led military campaign against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement and the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, which was allied with the Taliban. Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington DC, President George W. Bush gave the Taliban an ultimatum to surrender al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was America's most wanted individual because of his role as mastermind of the terrorist attacks. Faced with a stark refusal by the Taliban, the United States and Great Britain began launching air strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. The newest in a long succession of Afghan wars had just started.

The last foreign military to invade Afghanistan was the Soviet army, which, for more than a decade in the 1980s, bitterly fought an assortment of Islamic guerilla groups backed by Muslim countries and, covertly, by the American Central Intelligence Agency. With the withdrawal of the Soviets at the beginning of 1989, a new kind of fighting erupted in Afghanistan, this time among the formerly allied guerillas.

After years of relentless violence and bloodshed, a particularly devout Islamic faction, the Taliban, emerged as the most powerful actor on the Afghan political stage. The Taliban (a Pashtun word meaning “students”) soon seized control of most of Afghanistan and introduced strict social and religious laws and customs. From the mid-1990s on, the Taliban provided sanctuary to Osama bin Laden, head of the terrorist al-Qaeda network and a former anti-Soviet ally.

In 1998, accusing bin Laden of masterminding the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the United States launched a series of cruise missile attacks against several Afghan locations that were believed to host terrorist camps. When the September 11, 2001, attacks occurred, bin Laden was once again named the prime suspect, and the Taliban was asked to deliver him immediately for trial.

Afghanistan's Taliban rulers, however, demanded proof of bin Laden's involvement in the September 11 attacks and refused to hand him over to the United States. As a result, on October 7, 2001, less than one month after the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington DC, U.S. and British air forces attacked Afghanistan.

New Allies

The strikes began on a Sunday night and targeted the Taliban's air defenses, airports, suspected terrorist camps, and electricity grids. Dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom, the air campaign proved to be extremely efficient in terms of annihilating the Taliban's airpower. Simultaneous with the bombing, U.S. planes also dropped packages of food and medicine for the Afghan people, with whom the United States had no quarrel.

[Page 5]Looking for allies on the ground, the United States established close contacts with the anti-Taliban resistance (the Northern Alliance), which had been opposing the Taliban fundamentalists for more than half a decade. Before Operation Enduring Freedom, the resistance had been slowly losing the battle against the Taliban army, but with its capabilities bolstered by the United States, the Northern Alliance began to make steady military gains.

The Taliban progressively relinquished control of strategic locations, and, on November 9, 2001, the crucial town of Mazar-e Sharif was captured by the opposition. Caught between U.S. air raids and the ground advance of the Northern Alliance, many local Taliban commanders switched allegiance and joined the anti-Taliban forces.

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