Was the war against the Taliban carried out with the fullest vigor of our military? Of course not, never a need to; the Afghans fought on the ground and we bombed with our Air Force… as you recall we bombed them out of the Stone Age (as only Christopher Hitchens could quip). The Taliban fled into those mountains as close to the Afghan-Pakistani border with that singular ideal of self-preservation, and in Washington there was celebration for the brand new coalition government of Afghanistan. This is what we were told by our domestic press, although the international painted a much more subdued picture of Washington’s enthusiasm for the creation of a fractious new regime. Yet only after a careful examination (what now being a few hours of Googling the ‘Northern Alliance’, ‘Zahir Shah’, ‘Not Unsatisfied with Advances’) of those elder facts could you accept the truer premise that is not at all congruent with what our leadership says today: That the people who now rule in Kabul are in place for the sake of their country’s liberation. With great credulity, another utterly false statement by the Bush Administration is accepted sacrosanct by our pressmen… but why not investigate truly what goes on in and around Kabul? The war in Afghanistan is the forgotten war, and so much the easier for Americans to lose track of rather inconvenient facts and to accept conflicting explanations from those who claimed victory.

Please allow for a reframing of that first question. Was the war in Afghanistan fought by our commanders in Washington with the design being to utterly defeat a regime that was PROVEN to support global terrorism?

On November 13, 2001 the Northern Alliance entered Kabul, respectfully took down the Taliban’s flag (giving no offence to the scriptures from the Koran inscribed upon it), and started to search for any foreign Arab fighters they could catch. A crowd gathered and the chant “Death to the Taliban, Death to Pakistan” began in front of media present. The rebel fighters were quite jubilant from their unopposed entrance (The Taliban fled days earlier), a child reportedly flew his kite for the first time without fear of the former regime’s punishment for doing such an act, a woman wanted to remove her burkha… eventually. Although in the hours previous to this historic liberation of the capitol city, President Bush pleaded with the rebel leadership to stop their fighters from advancing… unsuccessfully. The reason for his doing so is one that continues to escape the memory of those still espousing the benefits that come from a Global War on Terror: The installation of a government friendly to the lawlessness of its neighboring country’s state-run cartel, the ISI (Pakistan’s Intelligence Service).

(end of part 1)