Afghanistan War Begins
The United States and Britain began air strikes on Afghanistan on 7 October 2001, less than a month after the attacks of 11 September, having demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden and been refused. The ground campaign was fought largely by the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban coalition whose leader Ahmad Shah Massoud had been assassinated two days before 11 September, supported by American special forces and airpower. Kabul fell on 13 November and the Taliban government collapsed within weeks. Bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora in December when the pursuit was left to Afghan proxies. The Bonn Agreement installed Hamid Karzai and a constitutional process, and NATO took over the security mission in 2003, the same year American attention and resources shifted to Iraq. The Taliban regrouped in Pakistan and the insurgency intensified from 2006. American troop numbers peaked at about 100,000 under Barack Obama's surge in 2010–11, and the war became the longest in American history. Some 2,400 American and over 1,100 allied soldiers died; Afghan military and police deaths ran to roughly 70,000 and civilian deaths to well over 46,000. The Doha agreement of February 2020, negotiated with the Taliban without the Afghan government, set a withdrawal date. The last troops left in August 2021 as the army the coalition had built for twenty years dissolved in ten days. Kabul fell on 15 August, and the airlift that followed left thousands behind. The Taliban returned to power under the same leadership structure that had been removed in 2001. Girls have been banned from education beyond primary level and women from most employment and public life. The cost to the United States is estimated at over two trillion dollars.
- Year: 2001 CE
- Category: Military
