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Back in December 2001, the overnight retreat of the Taliban appeared to be a cause for celebration and a vindication for the war’s defenders. The sudden disappearance of men who most analysts assumed would fight to the death spared Afghanistan’s capital city from more death and destruction, while allowing an interim government—headed by Hamid Karzai—to assume power before the year was out.

But the Taliban’s hasty retreat caused problems, too. In particular, it created a power vacuum in Kabul, which allowed the Northern Alliance to turn a military victory into a political one. In the absence of many U.S. ground troops, ethnic Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara leaders from the Alliance took charge in Kabul. Then, as the capital’s de facto rulers and the country’s liberators, they managed to occupy practically all the important posts in the interim government, including the ministries of the interior, defense, and justice. This was problematic because it meant that even though Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, was a Pashtun, the country’s largest (and traditionally dominant) ethnic group was underrepresented in the new government.

Equally problematic, the Taliban’s failure to mount much of a defense meant that most of its fighters survived and could, in conjunction with al-Qa‘ida elements, stage a new war. Regrouping in southern Afghanistan, Peshawar, and other Pakistani border towns, they launched hit-and-run attacks against U.S. troops and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the international organization charged with preserving order and overseeing reconstruction in Kabul. U.S. special forces proved only marginally successful in eliminating Taliban and al-Qa‘ida remnants. Their attempts to kill or capture Osama bin Laden failed utterly.

Border area

Despite these problems, preparations for popular elections got underway, reconstruction began, and hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees returned home from Pakistan and Iran.

With ISAF, the international peacekeepers, initially confined to Kabul, security in the regions was either enforced by warlords or leaders of militias, or not enforced at all. The result was that it was difficult or impossible to distribute aid, rebuild the infrastructure, or provide basic government services, throughout much of the country.

A Turkish soldier from ISAF patrols a Kabuli street - Kabul, 2002
© 2002 Getty Images, Inc.

In the still relatively lawless Pashtun south of the country, Taliban fighters staged a comeback. They murdered a Red Cross worker on March 27, 2003, and announced the start of a campaign to expel foreign, or coalition, troops and to destabilize the Karzai government. In the months that followed, they murdered more aid workers and other soft targets such as low-level government staff. They also tried to crack down on the number of girls attending school—an especially vicious campaign, involving burning down school buildings and beheading teachers. Meanwhile, the Taliban reversed an anti-drug stance and encouraged farmers to grow poppies for heroin, which they taxed.

In August 2003, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) took over the leadership of ISAF (which had previously rotated among the countries contributing troops) and expanded its mandate for providing security and overseeing reconstruction beyond Kabul. U.S. operations to kill the remaining Taliban and al-Qa‘ida fighters continued, but failed to halt a resurgence.

Amidst fears of violence and disruption, Afghanistan held presidential elections in October 2004. Hamid Karzai won, much to the displeasure of some of his opponents, including General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who cried foul play. Eleven months later, Afghans went to the polls again and voted in parliamentary elections. The winners included warlords, whom—despite pressure from human rights groups—President Karzai had refused to bar from running.

Karzai allowed many warlords to run and even offered some of them places in his cabinet because he felt that he needed their help to run the country. Without men like Dostum and Ismail Khan on his side, there would have been little hope of defeating the resurgent Taliban and the private army of disgruntled mujahideen commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, with whom the Taliban now appeared to be allied. Simply put, real military power in Afghanistan lay with the warlords and their militias, not the fledgling national army. And there just weren’t enough U.S. troops to eliminate Taliban fighters, who continued to enjoy strong support in southern Afghanistan and over the border in Pakistan.

But empowering the warlords brought problems of its own. Warlords rarely felt much of an obligation to turn over the tax revenue and import duties they collected. Giving them even more power simply aggravated those problems and may have delayed the emergence of Afghanistan as a functioning democracy, in which the men and women with power were accountable to the people that voted them in.

All that said, Karzai’s policies appeared to have had some success. By 2006, Ismail Khan, the Tajik general who Karzai made minister of energy, had given up all his heavy weapons and committed himself to the national government. Meanwhile, a serious liver problem had reduced Dostum, the hard-drinking Uzbek general, to a marginal player.

In an attempt to shore up Karzai’s government, the international community agreed to the Afghan Compact in January 2006. Essentially a road map for Afghanistan, the Compact laid out a path to security, good governance, economic reform, and the destruction of the opium trade.

In the months following the publication of the Afghan Compact, Taliban fighters emerged as an increasingly potent force. Their rise was helped considerably by the wide support they enjoyed over the border in Pakistan. Particularly in the Balochistan and Waziristan provinces, radical Pashtun clerics served as Taliban recruiting agents and provided a sanctuary for Taliban fighters fleeing coalition forces.

Both the Afghans and the Americans tried to pressure Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf to crack down on extremism in those provinces and do more to seal the border. But instead, Musharraf struck a deal with pro-Taliban militants, withdrawing Pakistani troops from the border region on the condition that the militants would cease attacking coalition forces in Afghanistan. The September 2006 deal, much criticized outside Pakistan, fell apart 10 months later after militants launched a series of bombings against Pakistani security forces.

In the midst of rising tensions and mutual recriminations between the Afghan and Pakistani governments, delegates from both countries met in August 2007 to discuss security measures and strategies for counteracting the Taliban insurgency. The loya jirga was notable less for any concrete proposals than for Musharraf’s acknowledgement that anti-coalition forces at work in Afghanistan received support “from Pakistan[i] soil.” Still, with anti-Musharraf and pro-Taliban sentiments already running high throughout Pakistan, there was a limit to what the Pakistani president could achieve. In the end, it was Musharraf’s failure to pacify the border region and his alienation of professionals in Pakistan’s major cities that made his position untenable. Facing almost certain impeachment, he resigned on August 18, 2008.

Pakistani lawyers protest the sacking of the country's chief justice - Lahore, 2007
© 2007 Getty Images, Inc.

Militarily, there are limits to what any of the forces now fighting in Afghanistan can achieve. Here’s why: it is extraordinarily difficult to stop a man from blowing himself up in a crowd without killing a lot of men who have no such intentions. Constrained by ethical considerations and the knowledge that dead civilians are easily transformed into enemy propaganda, coalition forces have sometimes let suicide bombers pass into populated areas. As a result, horrifying incidents like the murder of 59 school children on November 6, 2007, at a sugar factory continue to occur. Then there are the difficulties inherent in targeting guerrillas and insurgents from the air. Some of these were tragically illustrated on July 4, 2008, when U.S. forces mistakenly bombed a wedding party, killing the bride and 38 more women and children, and again on May 4, 2009, when about 140 civilians reportedly died after a U.S. warplane failed to observe proper rules of engagement.

The problems of purely military counter-insurgency tactics make it unlikely that there can be a purely military solution to the troubles in Afghanistan. So more deals with the Taliban, however unpalatable, will almost certainly be in the cards. Indeed, in the summer of 2009, reports surfaced that the United States and Britain were prepared to talk to “second-tier” Taliban, or influential Taliban commanders not part of Mullah Omar’s inner circle.

In the meantime, most observers agree that it is essential for Western states to follow through on financial, military, and other commitments. Failure to do so could lead to a repeat of the catastrophic failures of post-Soviet Afghanistan, which saw continuous civil war, the rise of the Taliban, and the arming and training of Islamist militants fanatically opposed to the West.