The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

Content Warning: This section contains accounts of terrorism and war-related violence.

On September 11, 2001, few Americans knew the name Osama bin Laden or very much about the country where he lived, Afghanistan. Yet the deadliest terrorist attacks in world history were the culmination of over two decades of history between the United States and the landlocked nation in central Asia. In December 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan to support an allied government that faced fierce internal resistance. Before long, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was helping to funnel arms, money, and logistical support to a variety of rebel groups known by the Arab term mujahideen (those engaged in jihad or, colloquially, holy warriors); the CIA hoped to turn the Soviet campaign into a quagmire, just as the Soviets had supported anti-American forces in Vietnam. The effort was ultimately successful, and Soviet forces withdrew in 1987. However, the war had profound effects on both the country and the wider world.

When the mujahideen ultimately overthrew the Soviet-backed government in 1992, they turned on each other. The resulting civil war left the country devastated, awash in weapons, and ignored by the international community, until a new hardline faction known as the Taliban imposed a strict form of Islamic law that many regarded as a welcome reprieve from anarchic violence. During the war, many Arab governments encouraged their own citizens to go and fight in Afghanistan, promoting a narrative of holy war to burnish their own religious credentials and redirect potential rebels to a faraway enemy. When the war was over, a small group of those Arab fighters, led by a young but extremely wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden, decided they could replicate their success against the Soviet Union against their own repressive governments and formed a group called Al Qaeda for that express task.

During this period, the United States mostly forgot about Afghanistan, aside from periodic contacts between the CIA Station Chief in nearby Lahore, Pakistan, and their former allies among the mujahideen. After moving to Sudan and funding a series of unsuccessful insurgencies in Algeria, Egypt, and other Arab countries, bin Laden decided that the United States was the real enemy since it provided the material and diplomatic support for the regimes he and his followers opposed.

Kicked out of Sudan in 1996 and stripped of his Saudi citizenship, bin Laden had nowhere to go but Afghanistan, where the Taliban reluctantly accepted him on the condition that he lend some of his terrorist infrastructure to the Taliban’s own campaigns. Bin Laden ultimately delivered on this promise by organizing the assassination of the Taliban’s biggest remaining rival, Ahmed Shah Massoud, on September 10, 2001. At that time, he was planning his greatest attack yet on the United States (following a simultaneous bombing of two US embassies in Africa in August 1998 and a seaborne attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000). By this point, the United States was well aware of bin Laden’s presence and his intentions and fired cruise missiles at his camps following the embassy bombings, but there had been no military plans to invade Afghanistan prior to the September 11 attacks. In the wake of those attacks, the United States entered into a country it had either treated as a proxy or ignored entirely.