Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about
THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
The War in Afghanistan stems from the United States invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October 2001, when the United States of America and its allies successfully drove the Taliban from power in order to deny Al-Qaeda a safe base of operations in Afghanistan. Since the initial objectives were completed, a coalition of over 40 countries (including all NATO members) formed a security mission in the country called International Security Assistance Force (ISAF, succeeded by the Resolute Support Mission (RS) in 2014), of which certain members were involved in military combat allied with Afghanistan's government.
The war has afterwards mostly consisted of Taliban insurgents fighting against the Afghan Armed Forces and allied forces; the majority of ISAF/RS soldiers and personnel are American. The war is code named by the US as Operation Enduring Freedom (2001–14) and Operation Freedom's Sentinel (2015–present); it is the longest war in US history.
Following the September 11 attacks in 2001 on the US, which was carried out by the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization led by Osama bin Laden, who was living or hiding in Afghanistan and had already been wanted since the 1998 United States embassy bombings, President George W. Bush demanded that the Taliban, who were de facto ruling Afghanistan, hand over bin Laden. The Taliban declined to extradite him unless they were provided clear evidence of his involvement in the attacks, which the US refused to provide and dismissed as a delaying tactic.
On October 7, 2001 the United States, with the United Kingdom, launched Operation Enduring Freedom. To justify the War, the Bush administration claimed that Afghanistan only had "selective sovereignty", and that intervention was necessary because the Taliban threatened the sovereignty of other states. The two were later joined by other forces, including the Northern Alliance – the Afghan opposition which had been fighting the Taliban in the ongoing civil war since 1996.
By December 2001, the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies were mostly defeated in the country, and at the Bonn Conference new Afghan interim authorities (mostly from the Northern Alliance) elected Hamid Karzai to head the Afghan Interim Administration. The United Nations Security Council established the ISAF to assist the new authority with securing Kabul, which after a 2002 loya jirga (grand assembly) became the Afghan Transitional Administration.
A nationwide rebuilding effort was also made following the end of the totalitarian Taliban regime. In the popular elections of 2004, Karzai was elected president of the country, now named the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. NATO became involved in ISAF in August 2003, and later that year assumed leadership of it. At this stage, ISAF included troops from 43 countries with NATO members providing the majority of the force. One portion of US forces in Afghanistan operated under NATO command; the rest remained under direct US command.
Following defeat in the initial invasion, the Taliban was reorganized by its leader Mullah Omar, and launched an insurgency against the Afghan government and ISAF in 2003. Though outgunned and outnumbered, insurgents from the Taliban (and its ally Haqqani Network)—and to a lesser extent Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin and other groups—waged asymmetric warfare with guerrilla raids and ambushes in the countryside, suicide attacks against urban targets, and turncoat killings against coalition forces. The Taliban exploited weaknesses in the Afghan government to reassert influence across rural areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan.
From 2006 the Taliban made significant gains and showed an increased willingness to commit atrocities against civilians – ISAF responded by increasing troops for counter-insurgency operations to "clear and hold" villages. Violence sharply escalated from 2007 to 2009.[84] Troop numbers began to surge in 2009 and continued to increase through 2011 when roughly 140,000 foreign troops operated under ISAF and US command in Afghanistan.
Of these 100,000 were from the US. On 1 May 2011, United States Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Abbotabad, Pakistan. NATO leaders in 2012 commended an exit strategy for withdrawing their forces, and later the United States announced that its major combat operations would end in December 2014, leaving a residual force in the country.
In October 2014, British forces handed over the last bases in Helmand to the Afghan military, officially ending their combat operations in the war. On 28 December 2014, NATO formally ended ISAF combat operations in Afghanistan and officially transferred full security responsibility to the Afghan government. The NATO-led Operation Resolute Support was formed the same day as a successor to ISAF.
At the beginning of Donald Trump's presidency in early 2017, there were fewer than 9,000 American troops in Afghanistan. By early summer 2017, troop levels increased by about 50%; there were no formal plans to withdraw. In August 2019, the Taliban planned to negotiate with the US to reduce troop levels back to where they had been when Trump took office, but Trump canceled the negotiations after a Taliban attack.
The Taliban remains by far the largest single group fighting against the Afghan government and foreign troops. On 29 February 2020, the United States and the Taliban signed a conditional peace deal in Doha, Qatar, which requires that U.S. troops withdraw from Afghanistan within 14 months so long as the Taliban cooperates with the terms of the agreement
Over 100,000 people have been killed in the war, including more than 4,000 ISAF soldiers and civilian contractors, more than 62,000 Afghan national security forces, 31,000 civilians and even more Taliban
And as always have a chilled day from the Viking
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