America’s longest war was founded on false pretences

Abstract

The war in Afghanistan ended as it had started, with total ambiguity of its objectives as well as what it achieved. The official Western narrative in 2001 was that “everything changed” on the day four airliners were hijacked and nearly 5,000 people murdered. The US intervention in Afghanistan, by this account, was hastily improvised in less than a month. However, the decisions shaping the US military campaign in Afghanistan in 2001 show a remarkable continuity based on an ongoing pre-September 11 evolution in the US foreign policy. As a matter of fact, the US operations in Afghanistan did not begin 20 years ago. But in 1979, during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.