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| by
Andrew Cottey About the author |
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* Chapter
summary from the SIPRI Yearbook 2003: In the wake
of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, the US-led intervention
and subsequent international peace-building efforts in Afghanistan
marked a significant shift in patterns of international military
intervention. A new focus on counter-terrorism and regime change
now runs alongside the longer-standing challenges of peacekeeping
and nation building. The al-Qaeda
terrorist group, which had its primary base in Afghanistan, was
widely viewed as responsible for the September 2001 terrorist
attacks on the USA. After the withdrawal of Soviet forces in
1989, Afghanistan was fractured by civil war. In the late 1990s
the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban regime came to power. Al-Qaeda’s
leader Osama bin Laden moved to Afghanistan in 1996 and a close
relationship developed between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. After the
September 2001 terrorist attacks, the Taliban refused to break
its ties with al-Qaeda or surrender the organization’s leaders.
As a result, on 7 October 2001 the USA launched military operations
against Afghanistan. The action was justified on grounds of self-defence,
in order to prevent further attacks. Rather than deploy large
numbers of ground forces, the USA relied on local Afghan allies
(the Northern Alliance), supplied with Russian arms and supported
by relatively small numbers of special forces. The combination
of highly accurate US airpower, the Northern Alliance allies,
special forces on the ground, and the military weakness of the
Taliban and al-Qaeda resulted in the dramatic collapse of the
Taliban regime in November and early December. Senior Taliban
and al-Qaeda leaders and significant numbers of fighters, however,
escaped and fled into the mountainous Afghan–Pakistani border
region. Some of these forces have continued to fight a low-level
war against US forces and its local allies in southern and eastern
Afghanistan. The US-led
intervention raised important ethical and legal issues. Intervention
to remove a state’s government and attack a terrorist organization
it was harbouring went significantly beyond traditional interpretations
of self-defence. The subsequent debate over the legitimacy of
intervention in Iraq highlighted the controversial nature of
the Bush Administration’s doctrine of pre-emptive intervention
and the precedent set in Afghanistan. Reports of human rights
abuses, atrocities and possible war crimes committed by Northern
Alliance forces raised questions about the ethics of relying
on local allies with poor human rights records. The capture of
hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters and the reluctance
of the US Government to grant formal prisoner-of-war status to
these detainees raised questions about the legal status and rights
of non-state terrorist groups. More generally, the US-led intervention
raised difficult questions about the applicability of the existing
international laws of war to counter-terrorist operations. The collapse
of the Taliban made the development of a new political and security
framework for Afghanistan an urgent priority. The December 2001
Bonn Agreement, signed by representatives of the majority of
non-Taliban groups, established a multi-ethnic Interim Administration
and laid out a political process for the country’s development.
A Loya Jirga (Grand Assembly) was held in June 2002, bringing
together over 1500 delegates from across Afghanistan and establishing
a new Transitional Authority to govern the country. Despite the
establishment of a theoretically multi-ethnic government and
the selection of Hamid Karzai (a member of Afghanistan’s
Pashtun ethnic majority) as president, the government is dominated
by the Tajiks and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance and most of
the country is under the control of regional warlords. Violent
incidents and human rights abuses continue, the rule of law is
non-existent and in the south and east there is significant Pashtun
resistance against the central government and the continued US
military presence. The international
community has provided an International Security Assistance Force
(ISAF) of about 5000 troops, a small United Nations Assistance
Mission (UNAMA) and a commitment of about $5 billion in aid over
six years. ISAF’s mandate is, however, limited to the capital,
Kabul. Critics argue that the international community has not
done enough to provide for security, law and order, and socio-economic
reconstruction. The situation remains extremely fragile: the
central government is weak, regional warlords are the dominant
force in the country, sporadic low-level violence continues and
renewed conflict could break out. The US and
wider international interventions in Afghanistan show that it
is possible to use military force to counter and disrupt terrorist
groups. However, they also illustrate that terrorist groups cannot
be defeated by military means alone.
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