Introduction
It won’t be an exaggeration to say that prior to 9/11 nobody would have imagined that the terror machine can go to that extent. Perhaps the US government had not realized the extent of damage that some of these groups could have done to US and its interests around the world. Though there were a number of instances in other countries where US establishments were targeted by such mischief makers, but such instances were considered mainly as failure of those nations in safeguarding the interests of USA, and nobody actually thought that one day, two US commercial flights full of passengers will collide with its own twin towers and result in killing around 3000 citizens of the world. They were office workers, waiters, police, firemen, moms, dads, friends and neighbors. 9/11 and subsequent events brought the issue of terrorism in the forefront of world politics. This proved to be a turning point towards considerably revamping the US international relations with countries in different regions in general and the Asia pacific in particular. India, for example has been at the receiving end of the terror plots for quite a while now, but it was considered a regional/ local issue by the international community. The 9/11 strike proved that terrorism is an international issue requiring international cooperation for a lasting solution.
The description of situation about Taliban
Afghanistan has been in news since early 1970s, but for all the wrong reasons. Earlier, it was a battle ground between the forces supported by US and the erstwhile USSR. Once the USSR was forced to withdraw from Afghanistan, and particularly after the demise of the government of President Najibullah, the country went into the hands of fundamentalist Islamic forces, known as Talibans, who ruled the country with iron fists. Some historian term the Taliban rule as a Jungle raj, because it was during their regime that the rights of citizens were taken off in the name of establishing Islamism.
This led to confrontationist situation with verbal duals between the western governments and the Taliban regime. Since USSR had disintegrated and USA was the only superpower left, the main target of Taliban regime was the interests of US and its allies. This led to the situation in which people like Osama-bin-Laden were provided shelter by the Taliban regime. After the September 11, 2001 attacks US government started taking steps to decimate the terror network and disrupt their fundraising activities. That is how the Taliban regime came into direct conflict with US. Since the Taliban refused to cooperate in tracing the terror suspects, US led forces attacked Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001 in through an operation codenamed as Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF)1.
The key issues in OEF were destruction of the terror network and freedom of Afghan people from the evil forces called Taliban. On the other hand US started diplomatic initiative as well to have as many supporting countries as possible in this war. Afghanistan being an Islamic nation, many countries in the Islamic world in general were not directly involved in this conflict, but none of them were supporting the Taliban regime either. In fact, Pakistan, a key sympathizer for Taliban’s was actively supporting US and its forces in this war. The main problem in this war has been to make the Islamic world understand the need for a united action against the so called jihad movement carried out by a few fanatics.
Conclusion
It goes to the credit of the OEF that today Afghanistan has a duly elected government headed by a democratically elected president. The country is on the path of development and many terror suspects have been eliminated by the allied forces. On the other hand, the OEF has been going on for more than six years now, but the allied forces have not been able to lay their hands on the key suspect called Osama Bin Laden so far. That’s one of the biggest failures of this operation.
References
Global Security (2008). Operation Enduring Freedom – Afghanistan. Web.