International community in Afghanistan comtinues....

The power struggle led to the emergence of micro-states and warlords who wreaked havoc on the remnants of the state structure and on the life and property of the people after the fall of the central government in 1992.

Two years after the destructive civil war between the formerly anti Soviet Afghan factions, a new politico-militant phenomenon called the Taleban, which emerged on the Afghan horizon in 1994, significantly changed the situation.

By enforcing unprecedented discipline in more than two thirds of the country, the Taleban largely succeeded in rebuilding at least the coercive apparatuses of the Afghan state. The Taleban–created Emirate of Afghanistan had its own drawbacks and faced severe problems one of them being the host to Osama Bin Laden, an Arab and veteran anti-Soviet fighter, who was suspected of masterminding the attacks on American installations all over the world and on the twin towers of the WTC in New York in 2001.

Al-Qaeda’s penetration into as many as sixty countries, the world’s vulnerability to the dictates of organizations under Al-Qaeda’s umbrella, and the serious threat that increasingly accessible weapons of mass destruction pose to civilization itself—all meant that the attack on the US served as a wake-up call, as if putting the world on notice that an almost tectonic shift is required in the way people think about threats to their security and that a vast increase is required in the resources they mobilize to counter those threats. The US used the Northern Alliance (NA), the main opposition force as foot soldiers supported by a US air campaign and a small number of Special Forces on the ground.

By financing and mobilizing former warlords defeated or pushed to the periphery earlier by the Taleban, the US used them against the remnants of the Taleban.

After the collapse of the Taleban administration, America announced its plan to build a ‘stable Afghanistan’ and installed an interim administration led by Hamid Karzai, a relatively less-known player in the Afghan political setting.

To be continued...