LONDON — This week is the sixth anniversary of the start of U.S. airstrikes against al-Qaida and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. It was a very clever political-military operation, and by December of 2001 all of Afghanistan was under the control of the United States and its local allies for a total cost of 12 American dead. Then it fell apart, and now the war is lost.
In the days after 9/11, George Tenet, the Central Intelligence Agency's chief, came up with a bold proposal. Why invade Afghanistan with a large American army, deploying massive firepower that kills large numbers of locals and alienates the population? Why give Osama bin Laden the long anti-American guerrilla war that he was undoubtedly counting on?
Instead, Tenet proposed sending teams of CIA agents and special forces into the country to win the support of the various militias, loosely linked as the Northern Alliance, that still dominated the northern regions of the country. Although the Taliban had controlled most of the country since 1996, they had never decisively won the civil war. So why not intervene in that war, shower their opponents with money and weapons and tip the balance against the Taliban?