Not long before Hamid Karzai was sworn in for his second term as Afghan president amid allegations of high-level corruption and a rigged election, the author assembled virtual snapshots of Afghanistan in her newspaper column, "Notes From Boomerang Creek," as a way to get people thinking about why Afghanistan continues to be important, as well as, "How do we get it right this time?" In ‘Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History’, Thomas Barfield says: “Landlocked Afghanistan lies in the heart of Asia, and links three major cultural and geographic regions: the Indian subcontinent to the southeast, central Asia to the north, and the Iranian plateau in the west.
They first rose to prominence in the border area of northern Pakistan and south-west Afghanistan in It's thought the Taliban first appeared in religious schools, mostly funded by Saudi Arabia, which preached a hardline form of Islam.They enforced their own austere version of Sharia, or Islamic law, and introduced brutal punishments. Why is the war in Afghanistan important? The author invites geography teachers to share snapshots from her own travels and newspaper columns of Afghanistan with their students. The general fear in India is that an unstable Afghanistan would hurt the construction of this pipeline and the subsequent flow of gas. To make matters worse, Afghanistan's government, that is full of tribal division, is often hamstrung. Answer. Training camps for al-Qaeda, the terror group run by 9/11 plotter Osama Bin Laden, were also hit.But 18 years on, it's hard to argue the US mission has been fulfilled - the Taliban may play a part in ruling Afghanistan again if peace talks do eventually succeed. And could this be another unspoken reason for involvement in Afghanistan: Opium farmer Haji Abdul Khan shows off damaged poppies to U.S. Marines and their military interpreter near remote Qalanderabad in southwest Afghanistan. Salter, Cathy. When international forces withdrew from fighting, Afghan forces left to lead the charge were easily overwhelmed. Afghanistan is adjacent to Middle Eastern countries that are rich in oil and natural gas. In late 2009, US President Barack Obama announced a troop "surge" that saw the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan top 100,000.The surge helped drive the Taliban out of parts of southern Afghanistan, but it was never destined to last for years.As a result, the Taliban were able to regroup. "We did not ask for this mission, but we will fulfil it," US President George W Bush said when he announced the first air strikes against Afghanistan on 7 October, 2001. Osama Bin Laden, the head of Islamist terror group al-Qaeda, was quickly identified as the man responsible.The Taliban, radical Islamists who ran Afghanistan and protected Bin Laden, refused to hand him over. As a former Peace Corps volunteer, avid traveler, classroom geography teacher, and writer, the author has been interested in Afghanistan for decades. Men were made to grow beards and women had to wear the all-covering burka.The Taliban banned television, music and cinema and disapproved of girls' education.And because the Taliban gave shelter to militants from the al-Qaeda group, it made them an immediate target for an attack by US, Afghan and international forces in the wake of 9/11.There are many reasons for this. They followed a radical form of Islam and enforced punishments like public executions.Within two months of the US and its international and Afghan allies launching their attacks, the Taliban regime collapsed and its fighters melted away into Pakistan.A new US-backed government took over in 2004, but the Taliban still had a lot of support in areas around the Pakistani border, and made hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the drug trade, mining and taxes.As the Taliban carried out more and more suicide attacks, international forces working with Afghan troops struggled to counter the threat the re-energised group posed.In 2014, at the end of what was the bloodiest year in Afghanistan since 2001, Nato's international forces - wary of staying in Afghanistan indefinitely - ended their combat mission, leaving it to the Afghan army to fight the Taliban.But that gave the Taliban momentum, as they seized territory and detonated bombs against government and civilian targets. 2012-11-28 16:12:26 2012-11-28 16:12:26. In 2018, the BBC found the Taliban was openly active across 70% of Afghanistan.Afghanistan had been in a state of almost constant war for 20 years even before the US invaded. A glance at a map and a little knowledge of the region suggest that the real reasons for Western military involvement may be largely hidden. A UN report in February 2019 said more than The same institute says conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan have cost the US The US is still conducting air strikes against the Taliban, instigated by the third president to oversee the war, Donald Trump. 0. But they didn't just disappear - their influence grew back and they dug in.Since then, the US and its allies have struggled to stop Afghanistan's government collapsing, and to end deadly attacks by the Taliban. 1. It is important because it is the longest war in the world.