Afghanistan

Afghanistan occupies two linked positions in the book: it is the setting for the U.S. military campaign after the September 11 attacks, and the clearest example of the author’s warning that retaliation can deepen the conditions that sustain political violence. The account places the campaign within a longer history of outside intervention, predicts the consequences of a mass assault for Afghan civilians and regional politics, and follows the interruption of food relief alongside the expansion of U.S. military reach into Central Asia.

A battlefield shaped by earlier intervention

The discussion does not treat the armed networks associated with Osama bin Laden as appearing from nowhere. It traces part of their history to the 1980s, when the CIA joined Pakistani, Saudi, British, and other services in recruiting, training, and arming some of the most extreme Islamist fighters available for a holy war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The account emphasizes the distinction between those recruited fighters and Afghans themselves: many of the people later called Afghans, including Osama bin Laden, were not Afghan. After the war, some turned their attention to places such as Chechnya and Bosnia, where they received at least tacit U.S. support, according to the discussion.

This history gives the later campaign a recursive quality. The forces raised for an earlier conflict did not simply disappear when that war ended; the account describes them as continuing to pursue their own agenda. In assessing the danger of a new assault, it therefore treats Afghanistan not only as a target of military action but also as a place where earlier policies had helped shape the networks now invoked to justify that action.

Warnings against a mass assault

From the first days after the attacks, NATO leaders, regional specialists, and, the account supposes, U.S. intelligence agencies warned the Bush administration that a mass attack killing many innocent people would fulfil Osama bin Laden’s aims. The concern was not limited to whether he survived. If he were killed without credible evidence of his involvement in the September 11 crimes, he could be regarded as a martyr by many Muslims who themselves condemned those crimes. His death or imprisonment, the passage adds, would not erase his influence: recordings were already circulating by the tens of thousands across the Muslim world, and he had given numerous interviews before September.

The predicted danger extended beyond his personal standing. An offensive that killed innocent Afghans could attract new recruits to the cause of his network and to other terrorist forces, which the account links to the CIA and its associates’ earlier effort to build forces for a holy war against the Russians. A separate warning describes an assault on Muslim populations as precisely the response Osama bin Laden and his associates hoped for: it would draw the United States and its allies into a trap. The argument is one of political consequence as much as immediate harm. Even if Osama bin Laden were killed, a massacre of innocents, the author argues, would intensify anger, despair, and frustration in the region and encourage new volunteers.

The account presents this warning as having influenced policy. It says that the message eventually reached the Bush administration, which chose another plan of action. That judgment is qualified by the discussion’s continuing concern that the administration could still kill Osama bin Laden without first providing credible evidence, or conduct an offensive that rallied further support for the network. Afghanistan thus remains at the center of a choice between an approach that risks reinforcing the conflict and one that takes account of the foreseeable political effects of force.

Airstrikes and the food emergency

The humanitarian consequences become especially concrete in the account of food relief. In early October, the World Food Programme moved hundreds of tonnes of food toward Afghanistan, but estimated that this would meet no more than 15 percent of the country’s needs. Those needs had already grown after international teams withdrew and deliveries were suspended for three weeks following the September 11 attacks. The airstrikes of October 7 then led the programme to halt all convoys and food distributions organized by its local teams.

The resulting danger was described in stark numerical terms. Aid representatives warned that as many as 1.5 million refugees might leave the country in a mass exodus after the attacks. A spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that 7.5 million Afghans lacked food and were on the verge of famine; a World Food Programme official said the threat of humanitarian catastrophe had reached a level almost beyond imagination. These figures appear alongside the practical distinction aid organizations drew between methods of delivery. They regarded food airdrops as a last resort and preferred truck deliveries, which they believed could reach almost the entire country.

The criticism of the airdrops concerned both their limited value as relief and their use in a setting where airstrikes had interrupted the larger-scale truck deliveries. Non-governmental organizations described the American airdrop publicity as a propaganda exercise rather than an effective way to get urgently needed aid to Afghans, and criticized the use of humanitarian assistance for propaganda while bombing was disrupting the World Food Programme’s main means of moving food. Aid officials called for airdrops to take place in daylight, with adequate warning and volunteers on the ground to collect and distribute supplies. The juxtaposition makes the claim of humanitarian purpose answerable to the actual conditions of delivery: food offered from the air could not simply substitute for the supply routes the attacks had stopped.

Strategic geography and military reach

The account places Afghanistan within a wider strategic geography. It argues that the United States established major military bases in Central Asia for the first time, describing those bases as important to the installation of U.S.-dominated multinational corporations and to control over the region’s substantial resources. It also links them to the effort to surround the world’s most important energy resources in the Persian Gulf. Before the war in Afghanistan, the discussion identifies Diego Garcia as the safest U.S. base in the network directed toward the Gulf; after the war, it says, the military position had improved and intervention, if judged appropriate, would be easier.

This is the author’s interpretation of the campaign’s strategic effects and purposes, not a claim presented as established by confidential documents. The account explicitly says that such documents are unavailable, while arguing that it is reasonable to imagine that the consequences were calculated and formed a principal aim of the bombing: to show what the United States could do to anyone who did not follow the rules of its game. The comparison is with NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which, in the account, had been defended by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as necessary to preserve NATO’s credibility. The author contrasts that stated concern with the absence of comparable concern for the credibility of Norway or Italy, reading the emphasis as a measure of U.S. power and its leading arms client’s position.

After September 11

The book presents the campaign in Afghanistan as part of a wider change accelerated by the September 11 attacks. It argues that governments used the attacks to introduce or intensify repressive policies, and that the Bush administration understood the new phase of the war on terror as an opportunity to consolidate an already overwhelming military advantage and promote global dominance. The new bases in Central Asia are part of this account: they extend the military network beyond the positions that had previously secured access to the Gulf and make future intervention easier.

The discussion also links this expansion to a recurring contrast between public justification and strategic consequence. The language of counterterrorism and humanitarian assistance accompanies a campaign that, in the author’s analysis, risks increasing recruitment to the forces it seeks to defeat while strengthening U.S. military reach. Afghanistan therefore functions as more than a location on a map. It is where the narrative’s two lines meet: the blowback associated with earlier intervention and the possibility that a new use of force will reproduce the conditions of further conflict. The conclusion is not that every consequence can be known in advance, but that the existing evidence makes the danger of escalation, civilian deprivation, and expanded military power impossible to dismiss.