The mother of all wars
Eight years after US troops arrived in Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the war there is more deadly — and more muddled — than ever.
When American troops first went to Afghanistan, they did so to overthrow the Taliban regime, which then ruled the nation and provided a haven for al-Qaeda. In less than three months, the Taliban was defeated, and a US-supported administration, headed by President Hamid Karzai, was installed in Kabul. Yet in 2009, the US is still fighting the Taliban, and al-Qaeda operatives are still plotting from Afghanistan. And one part of the region’s deadly muddle has gotten worse. In 2001, there were fears that the war in Afghanistan would destabilise Pakistan.
(The Pashtun ethnic group, which makes up a large part of the Taliban insurgency, straddles the border between the two countries.) Those fears are now reality; the Pakistani Taliban threatens nuclear-armed Pakistan’s viability as a state even more than its cousins jeopardise Afghanistan’s. It is because the war in Afghanistan threatens to destabilise an entire region that it has become America’s biggest foreign policy challenge.
On December 1, 2009, Obama announced that he would escalate US military involvement by deploying an additional 30,000 soldiers over a period of six months. He also proposed to begin troop withdrawals 18 months from that date.
The following day, the American commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley A McChrystal, cautioned that the timeline was flexible and “is not an absolute” and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, when asked by a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee if it is possible that no soldiers would be withdrawn in July 2011, responded, “The president, as commander in chief, always has the option to adjust his decisions.”
According to a November 2009 UNICEF report, Afghanistan is the most dangerous place in the world for a child to be born. Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world—257 deaths per 1,000 live births, and 70% of the population lacks access to clean water, the agency said. In the same month, Afghanistan slipped three places in Transparency International’s annual index of corruption perceptions, becoming the world’s second most-corrupt country ahead of Somalia.