Quickly
Socially
Trending
Crypto
Kabul, Aug 31 (AP) It was Nov. 13 , 2001. The sun had just begun to rise over the Hindu Kush Mountains when the Taliban disappeared from Kabul, the battered capital of Afghanistan.
The bodies of foreign Arabs who had stayed behind were mutilated and bloodied. They had been found and killed by advancing Afghans of another faction who were brought to the city by a blistering U.S.-led campaign that drove the Taliban from power.
America was still reeling from the horrific terrorist attacks of two months earlier, when planes flown by al-Qaida terrorists crashed into three iconic buildings and a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 3,000 people.
The perpetrators and their leader, Osama bin Laden, were somewhere in Afghanistan, sheltered by the Taliban .
The mission: Find him. Bring him to justice.
Right then, Afghanistan — two decades of disorder behind it, two decades more just ahead — was suspended in an in-between moment. The recent pages of its book were already filled with so much heartbreak, but for the first time in a while, some blank pages full of potential sat just ahead. Nothing was certain, but much seemed possible.
Against that backdrop, Afghans understood the mission against bin Laden to mean a chance to secure their future — a future as murky on that day as it is today. In those post-2001 months and years, they believed in the power of "the foreigners.”
From hundreds of years ago right up to the jumbled chaos of recent days as the United States pulled out of its air base and then the capital, the word “foreigner” has meant many things in the Afghan context, from invaders to would-be colonizers.
But in November 2001, in a mostly ruined Afghan capital where rutted roads were filled with bicycles and beat-up yellow taxis, it meant hope.
___
Torek Farhadi joined scores of educated and trained Afghan expatriates who returned to their homeland in 2002 after the Taliban were gone. He wanted to be part of the new Afghanistan that the U.S.-led invasion promised.
“I found the people relieved fresh and full on energy to start anew," the economist said from his home in Geneva, as he watched the Taliban's return to power last month. He remembered, too, the “smart young women” he encountered who had lost huge chunks of their educations to Taliban repression between 1996 and 2001.
The arrival of the U.S.-led coalition weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks ended a repressive, religiously radical regime that had more in common with the sixth century than the 21st.
Mullah Mohammad Omar, the reclusive one-eyed leader of the Taliban, had brought the village to the city. The strict edicts he taught at his one-room mud madrassa, or religious school, became law. Girls were denied education. Women were confined to their homes or, when in public, inside the all-encompassing burqa. Men were told to wear beards. Television was banned, as was all music but religious chants.
When the Taliban fled and the new, post 9/11 leader, Hamid Karzai, entered the sprawling presidential palace, he discovered the Taliban had left their mark. The grand piano had been gutted; only the elegant shell remained. The insides had been removed — seemingly out of fear that a piano key might be accidentally pressed and music made.
Wall-to-wall hand-painted miniature murals had been defaced; Taliban who believed images of living things were a crime against Islam went to every tiny bird and blotted out its face with a black marker.
In those first years, George W. Bush's defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, vowed there would be no nation-building. The running of the country was handed to Washington's Afghan allies, many of whom had destroyed Kabul with their bitter feuding when they last ruled. Under their corruption, the country devolved into a collection of fiefdoms that enriched local warlords and led to the Taliban's rise.
Ethnic Pashtuns, the majority group that had made up the backbone of the country, were suddenly disenfranchised. In 2002, the deputy police chief of Zabul, a southern province that was once a Taliban stronghold, sent 2,000 young Pashtun men to Kabul to join the Afghan national army. They were teased and mocked; the deputy chief said all but four ended up joining the Taliban.
Giant posters of slain anti-Taliban fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud — an ethnic Tajik warlord who was assassinated on Sept. 9, 2001 — were plastered on official vehicles and inside the Defense Ministry. The first defense minister, Mohammad Fahim, a Massoud lieutenant, deepened the divisions by institutionalizing ethnic discrimination.
The Afghan military that would collapse in the wake of Taliban advances in 2021 began existence with its recruits often more loyal to a warlord than the army itself. Training was barely eight weeks for new, generally uneducated men. Building the Afghan army was often likened to repairing an aircraft midflight.
So across Afghanistan, quickly and understandably, it started: The defeated Taliban began to re-emerge. And it kept getting worse.
By 2012, just two years before the U.S. and NATO handed over the operational end of the war to Afghanistan's government, the Afghan army was barely competent and filled with fighters angry at what they considered poor treatment by their foreign trainers. Soldiers wore boots with holes because a shoddy contractor, paid millions by corrupt officials, had delivered substandard equipment. At an army outpost in the deadly east, helmets were so scarce that five soldiers took turns wearing one.
And U.S. trainers? They were no longer attending training sessions where live ammunition was being used.
They feared the weapons might be turned on them. (AP)
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)
Share Now
Google Trends
Live Bot