The story of Afghanistan over the last two decades in many ways reflects the story of the post-9/11 world, writes KathyGannon. It’s an arc that ran from early hope to despair.
the word “foreigner” has meant many things in the Afghan context, from invaders to would-be colonizers.
The arrival of the U.S.-led coalition weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks ended a repressive, religiously radical regime that had more in common with the sixth century than the 21st. Wall-to-wall hand-painted miniature murals had been defaced; Taliban who believed images of living things were a crime against Islam went to every tiny bird and blotted out its face with a black marker.
Giant posters of slain anti-Taliban fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud — an ethnic Tajik warlord who was assassinated on Sept. 9, 2001 — were plastered on official vehicles and inside the Defense Ministry. The first defense minister, Mohammad Fahim, a Massoud lieutenant, deepened the divisions by institutionalizing ethnic discrimination.
By 2012, just two years before the U.S. and NATO handed over the operational end of the war to Afghanistan’s government, the Afghan army was barely competent and filled with fighters angry at what they considered poor treatment by their foreign trainers. Soldiers wore boots with holes because a shoddy contractor, paid millions by corrupt officials, had delivered substandard equipment. At an army outpost in the deadly east, helmets were so scarce that five soldiers took turns wearing one.
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