Gibburt

On October 4th 2001, a mere there weeks after 9/11, NATO invoked article 5 of the treaty for the first time in its history. Bluntly speaking, this article says that an attack on one is considered an attack on all.
In reality this meant that the US no longer stood alone in their wish to retaliate the 9/11 attacks. All member countries of the NATO were now obliged to help the US in their effort to fight the perpetrators and brains behind the attacks.
The attacks were quickly linked to al-Qaeda, a terrorist network operating from training camps in Afghanistan.  From the ultra orthodox theocratic regime in Afghanistan, the Taliban, the US demanded the delivery of all al-Qaeda leaders located in Afghanistan, the closing of all terrorist training camps and full access to the training camps.
However, when increasing pressure on the Taliban didn’t yield any al-Qaeda members to show the public that was waiting to see blood, the US and UK, backed by the NATO, screwed international law and invaded Afghanistan.
A little more than a month later the capital fell and another month later, with the fall of Kandahar in early December, the bulk of the country was under control of the allied troops.
It was not until December 20th that the UN Security Council issued a mandate for foreign forces to secure and protect Kabul and the area around it. This ofcourse doesn’t make the actions prior to that date suddenly legal or justified.

Today, eight years later and approximately 20,000 casualties on both sides later, Afghanistan still has no sound political structure, is an economical wasteland and rather ignorant of human rights. The Taliban has never been under control and terrorism hasn’t been rooted out.

Recently a Dutch paper published an interview with Paul Pillar, who served for 30 years as an analyst at the CIA. He stated that the US and other Western governments say that we went to Afghanistan to prevent terrorist groups like al-Qaeda to find safe havens, serving as staging point for new attacks. According to Pillar the assumption that terrorist need safe havens as a staging point for new attacks is untrue: terrorist don’t need a sanctuary to prepare actions. Therefore the operation in Afghanistan is based on a false premise. The threat of more terrorist attacks wouldn’t increase significantly if we allow the terrorists to have a sanctuary.

To put it in other words: why whould we let our soldiers put their lives at stake in Afghanistan for a goal that hasn’t been reached after eight years, a goal that was unsound from the very beginning?

Filed under: Politics by Cédric | Social tagging: afghanistan > isaf > nato > terror