The Changing Face of Afghanistan, 2001-08

The attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11) were the most catastrophic attacks on the
U.S. homeland since Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. They were particularly devastating because
they were perpetrated by a small number of lightly-armed religious extremists, and thus
brought home to the United States the lethality of ideologically-motivated asymmetric
warfare in the 21st century. The attacks were recognized as acts of war by both the George
W. Bush administration and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which invoked
Article 5 for the first time in its history. The President declared the United States
would respond to the attacks accordingly, using all of its relevant resources. While the
administration recognized the enemy facing the United States and the civilized world
was the combination of a global network of Islamic extremist groups (al Qaeda was but
one of the groups) and their state and nonstate sponsors, it focused first on Afghanistan.
Shortly after 9/11, President Bush articulated his broad foreign policy goals in Afghanistan
and laid out a strategy that included the main instruments of U.S. national
power: diplomatic, economic, and military. He also recognized the United States could
not achieve its objectives unilaterally; he welcomed and strongly supported cooperation
with the United Nations (UN) and the international community. Throughout the entire
Bush administration, from 2001 to 2008, the U.S.-led effort in Afghanistan was multilateral
and multinational.
The overarching U.S. goals for Afghanistan, which remained unchanged throughout
the Bush administration, and which were maintained by the Barack Obama administration,
were to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its allies, stop their use of
Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and engage in reconstruction to help the
emergence of a representative, democratic government so that Afghanistan could never
again become a sanctuary for terrorist groups. The achievement of the overarching goals
required a strategy of mutually reinforcing political, economic, and military efforts.
The Bush administration’s main political objectives in Afghanistan were to encourage
the establishment of stable, representative political institutions and the rule of law.
Its main economic objectives were to encourage basic human development, critical reconstruction,
and the establishment of stable economic institutions and a market-based
economy. Its main military objective was to provide security, so that political and economic
development could proceed. The administration repeatedly emphasized that security,
economic development, stable governance, the rule of law, and human rights
were all interconnected, and that continued progress in all areas were necessary to ensure
Afghanistan did not again become a sanctuary for transnational terrorist movements.
While the overall U.S. objectives remained constant, the strategies to achieve
them evolved over time as progress was made, or to account for the sheer difficulty of
bringing into the 21st century a country as destroyed and undeveloped as Afghanistan.
While the strategies of the United States and its partners in the international community
were never adequately synchronized or coordinated, their efforts were unprecedented
in Afghanistan. By 2008, more than 40 countries and hundreds of governmental
and nongovernmental organizations were engaged in political, economic, and military
efforts. Despite legitimate criticisms of shortcomings and failures, concrete progress was made in the country between 2001 and 2008. In a short period of time, Afghanistan, with
U.S. and international assistance, created the foundations for a representative democracy
and market-based economy and it identified clear future goals in various international
agreements.
One could argue there was a basis for optimism about Afghanistan over the long
term as administrations transitioned from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, due to
the massive international and Afghan efforts after 2001, the embrace of representative
political institutions by the Afghan people and their rejection of the Taliban. While the
struggle had been long and hard, U.S. senior leaders expressed confidence by early 2009
that, with continued international engagement and support, Afghanistan can reach the
tipping point where it has enough internal capacity and capability to govern and secure
itself, allowing the international community to step into the background. This would
mean the definitive achievement of the main U.S. objective in Afghanistan: ensuring it
never again becomes a sanctuary for transnational terrorist groups.