Editor's Notebook: Afghan War Now Country's Longest
The Afghan war was enormously popular when it began on a fall Sunday eight and a half years ago. Less than a month had passed since the September 11 attacks, and President Bush could draw on deep wells of support when he ordered air strikes against Kabul , Jalalabad and the Taliban stronghold at Kandahar.
"We are supported," Bush said that day, with only slight exaggeration, "by the collective will of the world."
By mid-November American forces had driven the Taliban from the capital; at month's end Kandahar was in the U.S. sights; in early December the Taliban leadership fled, and Marines set up a base near the Kandahar airfield.
No one proclaimed "Mission Accomplished," but they might as well have. Surely, it seemed, this would be a brief campaign.
On the one-year anniversary, in October 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told CNN, "The Taliban are gone. The Al Qaeda are gone." U.S. forces were by then in Iraq, of course; that seemed the conflict to worry about.
On the one-year anniversary, in October 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told CNN, "The Taliban are gone. The Al Qaeda are gone." U.S. forces were by then in Iraq, of course; that seemed the conflict to worry about.
And yet here we are, nearly a decade since that October Sunday, and the end of this often-tabbed "Other War" is hard to see, or fathom. Under the order of a new commander-in-chief, the U.S. is now "surging" forces into Afghanistan; a new and complex mission looms in Kandahar; and the Taliban are "surging," too