Afghanistan War: A History from Beginning to End

On September 11, 2001, the United States faced the most devastating terrorist attack in world history when members of al-Qaeda, an Islamist fundamentalist movement, hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed them into buildings in New York and Washington, DC. Nearly three thousand people died in these attacks, and one month later, US President George W. Bush announced the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, a military operation intended to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan and ensure that terrorists from al-Qaeda had no safe haven in that country.

Most people assumed that the conflict would be short, but this would become America’s longest war. US and NATO troops would remain in Afghanistan for 20 years until their final withdrawal in 2021. During that period, around a quarter of million people died in Afghanistan, many of them civilians, and expenditure by the US government alone is believed to have exceeded $2.3 trillion.

What was the outcome of this protracted and destructive war? The Taliban, the people Operation Enduring Freedom was intended to remove, are back in control of Afghanistan, whose ordinary citizens currently face poverty and famine. How can that be? How can a war prosecuted for 20 years by some of the richest nations on Earth fail to defeat a rag-tag guerilla army or to achieve lasting change in Afghanistan? This is the complex and tragic story of the Afghanistan War from 2001 to 2021.