Picking on the empty husk of Operation Enduring Freedom

World of Politics with Harry McGee

It’s almost 20 years ago since I was in Afghanistan. I went in late October 2001 and stayed there for a month, in the north-west of the country, which remained the only corner not controlled by the Taliban until then.  Even a day on the ground there would tell you that the vast project launched by the American and their Western allies back then – Operation Enduring Freedom – was self-contradictory and would never achieve its goals.

The background, of course, was September 11 2001. On that day four passenger jets were hijacked by Saudi fanatics and used as devastating weapons to wreak the most possible damage.

One crashed to earth in Pennsylvania, another was flown into the Pentagon. Both caused hundreds of deaths. But it was the other two, which crashed into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center killing thousands of people, that rocked the entire globe on its axis.

To see those two giant gleaming twin towers – symbols of New York and of the USA – being toppled like that was an unforgettable moment of horror; like a malevolent giant-slaying exercise.

Such an act of war and provocation demanded a response. But it was difficult. This was an asymmetric attack. It did not come from a particular State or Government or country. While the attackers were all from Saudi Arabia, they had not been sponsored by its rulers, vile and all as they were.

These were non-state actors, aligned to a terrorist group that few had heard of before that, Al-Qaida, but was on everybody’s lips after that.

A Saudi dissident named Osama Bin Laden was the figurehead of the group. Like a lot of other Islamic extremists, he had gained his spurs in Afghanistan, in the long and blood-curdling guerrilla campaign against the Soviets, who invaded the country in 1980 before withdrawing in 1989.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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