(Mission of Folly: Part two) Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. assault on Afghanistan commenced on October 7, 2001, almost four weeks after the terror attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. on September 11. Initial aerial attacks were carried out by land-based B-1, B-2 and B-52 bombers, as well as by carrier-based F-14 and F/A-18 bombers. In addition, Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched at enemy targets from American and British ships.

The goals of the Afghanistan mission were outlined to the U.S. Congress and to the American people in two speeches delivered by President George W. Bush. The first address to the U.S. Congress was a declaration by the President that the United States was now involved in a War on Terror. The second, a live television address to the people of the United States, explained the purposes of the American assault on Afghanistan.

“The evidence we have gathered,” Bush reported to Congress on September 20 in answer to the question on the minds of Americans — Who attacked the United States? — “all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as Al Qaeda. They are the same murderers indicted for bombing American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and responsible for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Al Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world — and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.”

The President issued an ultimatum to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan:

    The United States of America makes the following demands on the Taliban:

    Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of Al Qaeda who hide in your land. Release all foreign nationals — including American citizens — you have unjustly imprisoned, and protect foreign journalists, diplomats, and aid workers in your country.

    Close immediately and permanently every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and hand over every terrorist, and every person in their support structure, to appropriate authorities.

    Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer operating.

    These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. The Taliban must act and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.

The ultimatum, a sure precursor to war, was followed by an explanation to Americans and the world that the United States was now involved in a War on Terror. Bush depicted the enemy in this wide-ranging struggle in the following terms:

“Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. Americans are asking: Why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber — a democratically elected government.

“Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.”

Having issued an ultimatum to the Taliban, Bush concluded his speech with an ultimatum to the rest of the world:

    Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbour or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regimeâe¦ The hour is coming when America will actâe¦

    This is not, however, just America’s fight. And what is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom. We ask every nation to join us. We will ask, and we will need, the help of police forces, intelligence services, and banking systems around the world.

For the Bush administration, this was the seminal moment. The War on Terror would be prosecuted as a global struggle and the United States was putting all the countries of the world on notice. There were to be no neutrals in this struggle: countries that were not on the side of the United States, would be deemed to be on the side of the terrorists.

In his television address on October 7, Bush announced that the assault on the Taliban regime and Al Qaeda had commenced:

    The United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.

    We are joined in this operation by our staunch friend, Great Britain. Other close friends, including Canada, Australia, Germany and France, have pledged forces as the operation unfolds. More than 40 countries in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and across Asia have granted air transit or landing rights. Many more have shared intelligence. We are supported by the collective will of the world.

Bush went on to say that the goal of the military action was to drive the terrorists from their hiding places and bring them to justice. Again the President warned the nations of the world that this struggle extended far beyond Afghanistan: “Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers, themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril.”

In the style that was to characterize the global policies of his administration, the struggle ahead was depicted in terms of black and white, good and evil. Many countries in the past had suffered terrorist assaults on their citizenry.

Canadians had endured the Air India bombing. On June 23, 1985, Air India flight 182 was blown out of the sky south of Ireland above the Atlantic Ocean. All of the 329 passengers and crew died. Eighty-two were children and 280 were Canadian citizens. (On a per capita basis, the Air India bombing was as devastating a blow to Canada as the September 11 attacks were to the United States.)

For years the British had lived with bombings and casualties that resulted from the campaign waged by the Irish Republican Army and its offshoots to make Northern Ireland a part of the Irish Republic.

Similarly, France had suffered as a consequence of bombings perpetrated by terrorists of North African origin. In September 1986, in one episode, the Tati Department Store was attacked in Paris. Seven died and 54 were injured, most of the victims being mothers and children. Many other countries had also suffered as a consequence of the scourge of terrorism.

The suffering and anguish of Americans as a consequence of September 11 were enormous. The difference between the United States and the other countries that have been victims of terrorism is that the United States was uniquely powerful militarily. Other countries subjected to terrorist attack mobilized the means available to them to increase their security and to guard against future attacks. To make what may seem a facile point, Canada did not consider taking military action in response to the Air India bombing.

The United States, though, was in an entirely unique position. Alone among the countries of the world, it had the military means to reach out across thousands of kilometres to carry out an assault on remote Afghanistan. By deciding on a military invasion as the American response to the terror attacks, the Bush administration was raising the stakes enormously.

This was no mere police action. The invasion would turn out the regime in power and replace it with another. And by declaring that the action in Afghanistan was only one front in a much wider War on Terror in which the whole world was involved, the Bush administration was raising the stakes much further still. The United States was pledging to deliver its version of liberty to humanity and to rid the world of a dark menace.

From the beginning, the Afghan mission, Enduring Freedom, was cast in ideological terms. Its authors would not be satisfied with success against the Taliban and the Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. They were determined to use the provocation of September 11 to change the world and to increase the power of the United States throughout the globe.

Pentagon planners complained that Afghanistan had precious few military targets of high value. While Afghanistan was the immediate target, from the first days, the top decision makers in the administration were thinking about a showdown with what they regarded as a much more important foe — Iraq.

Even before the invasion of Afghanistan, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Under Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz were preoccupied with the idea of an invasion of Iraq. In their thinking, Iraq would be the decisive field of battle, while Afghanistan was merely the sideshow.

The coming assault on Iraq was the focal point of American foreign policy and military policy from the earliest days after September 11. The neo-conservatives who dominated the Bush administration developed a theory about how an American occupation of Iraq would lead to positive results for the United States on a number of crucial issues in the Middle East.

The assumption on which the earlier administration of George Bush Sr. had operated was that to improve the American position in the Middle East, the Palestinian question would have to be settled. The administration of George W. Bush, on the other hand, started from a radically different premise — that a U.S. occupation of Iraq would open the door to a settlement of the Palestinian question which would suit both Israel and the United States.

The idea, advanced by Paul Wolfowitz, was that if the U.S. occupied Iraq and ushered a pro-American regime into power, Iraq could develop into a model democratic, constitutional state in which Islam was the religion of the population, but in which radical Islamic theocratic concepts could be pushed to the margin. Iraq would be America’s tabula rasa in the region, the blank slate on which the United States could write its liberal-democratic narrative. The effect would reverberate through the region.

Other benefits would accrue to the U.S. from the occupation of Iraq. Bordering on Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria, Iraq would be an ideal place for the U.S. to establish permanent military bases. The Saudis were prickly about the political effects of having U.S. forces stationed on their territory. From Iraq, the U.S. could keep a close eye on the hostile regimes in Iran and Syria. American power in the Persian Gulf would be ensured. The U.S. would be able to establish a dominant position for American oil companies in Iraq and to look out for their interests in the rest of the Middle East.

In addition, the strengthened position of the U.S. in the region would help muscle the Palestinians into taking what they could get in a deal with Israel, even if it fell far short of creating a state on all of their territory Israel had occupied since 1967 including East Jerusalem.

These were heady dreams and they were to morph into nightmares. The details of the U.S. led invasion of Iraq are well known and need not detain us here. What is significant is how that invasion turned out.

On May 2, 2003, weeks after the American assault on Iraq, President George W. Bush landed in a warplane on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. After the tailhook landing, the President climbed out of the plane, greeted by a huge banner that read “mission accomplished.” Dressed in the fatigues of a Navy fighter pilot, Bush swaggered across the deck. The President, who had avoided combat in Vietnam as a member of the Texas Air National Guard, was presiding over a quickly won military triumph.

Flash forward to November 7, 2006. With U.S. combat deaths in Iraq approaching 3,000 dead and wounded exceeding 25,000, and with Iraq sinking into civil war, American voters handed both Houses of Congress to the Democrats. The day after the election, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned. His designated replacement, Robert Gates, in a congressional confirmation hearing, frankly acknowledged that the United States was not winning in Iraq.

On December 6, 2006, the Iraq Study Group, headed by Republican James Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton, reported its recommendations to the Bush administration. Established to find a way to get the United States out of the Iraq quagmire, the Study Group’s recommendations amounted to a flat repudiation of the foreign and military policies of the administration. The report recommended the withdrawal of large numbers of U.S. forces from Iraq by the beginning of 2008 and advised that overtures be made to Syria and Iran to seek the collaboration of these countries in finding a settlement of the conflict in Iraq.

Almost from the first days of the American assault, Afghanistan became the forgotten war. Always the centre of the American strategic effort in the Middle East and Central Asia, Iraq continued to condition the outcome of the struggle in Afghanistan.

If the U.S. were to withdraw in disgrace from Iraq (now the most likely outcome), it was exceedingly unlikely that the United States would commit to a lengthy war in Afghanistan. During the first phase of the assault on Afghanistan, the Americans operated with impunity in the air, concentrating their attacks on Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad as well as on Al Qaeda training camps. The Taliban quickly lost their ability to coordinate their efforts, with their systems of “command and control” rapidly degraded.

The Americans and their allies were not the only opponents of the Taliban. The regime in Kabul was already in a state of conflict with a force called the Northern Alliance when the U.S. attack began. The Northern Alliance was composed of diverse ethnic and religious elements whose members, for one reason or another, were involved in an insurgency against the Taliban.

While the power of the Taliban rested largely on the Pashtuns, who predominated in the country’s south and east, the Northern Alliance was mainly non-Pashtun. At the time of the September 11 terror attacks, the Northern Alliance fielded a core force of about 15,000 soldiers, mostly Tajik and Uzbek fighters, whose base was in northeastern Afghanistan in Badakhshan, as well as in eastern Takhar province, the Panjshir Valley and part of the Shomali plain north of Kabul. The Northern Alliance counted on support from Iran, Russia and Tajikistan.

Viewed over the longer term, the American involvement in Afghanistan which pre-dated the invasion of 2001 resembled a revolving door. Friends became foes and foes became friends in rather farcical fashion.

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the United States helped sponsor the creation of the Mujahideen, a fundamentalist Islamic movement that opposed the Soviets and despised the secular pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. Osama bin Laden learned much about insurgent warfare during these times when he was on the American-backed side against the Soviets.

Later, when the Soviets were driven out, subsequent struggles led to the installation of the Taliban regime whose fighters included many who had fought on the side of those supported by Washington.

Still later, when the Gulf War in 1991 involved a marked increase in the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden became an embittered enemy of America. A Saudi himself, he was no more prepared to contemplate a large Infidel (American) presence in the land that housed Islam’s holiest sites, than he was to abide the Soviet hold on Afghanistan.

In the autumn of 2001, the Americans were attacking a country that had earlier been liberated by forces they had backed who were now their enemies, while their friends numbered among them foes from the previous struggle. Despite the rhetoric served up for Americans, Canadians and Europeans about this being a struggle about human rights and democracy, the forces involved and their respective histories, made this an implausible claim from the start.

(Part two will be continued.)