Ousting the Taliban
Bush made his demands in the midst of a rapid U.S. military buildup in the Middle
East and Indian Ocean, supported by Great Britain. U.S. special forces and intelligence
agents also moved into northern Afghanistan to coordinate war plans with command-
ers of the Northern Alliance, the last major guerrilla group still fighting five years after
the Taliban took power. The Northern Alliance, however, recently had lost its most
successful commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud, who had been killed in a terrorist-
type bombing two days before the September 11 attacks.
The Taliban took none of the steps demanded by Bush, so on October 7, U.S.
and British forces launched air attacks against military targets in Afghanistan while
Northern Alliance forces moved south from their camps into the valleys of northern
Afghanistan. In coordinated speeches from Washington and London, Bush and Brit-
ish prime minister Tony Blair announced the start of combat in Afghanistan and set
out what appeared to be limited goals for it. Bush said the “carefully targeted actions
are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to
attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.” Blair said the war’s objectives
were “to eradicate Osama bin Laden’s network of terror and to take action against the
Taliban regime that is sponsoring it.” Neither leader specifically listed removing the
Taliban from power as a goal, though this clearly was their intent.
Taliban forces put up fierce resistance for several weeks in the face of unrelenting
U.S. bombing, but the tide of war eventually turned against them. On November 9
the Northern Alliance captured Mazar e-Sharif, a city that had been a center of fight-
ing throughout the late 1990s. Four days later, on November 13, the Taliban aban-
doned Kabul, and units from the Northern Alliance moved into the capital, greeted
by cheering crowds. Taliban forces retreated to Kandahar, the group’s original base in
southern Afghanistan, but were forced from that city on December 9, ending the last
vestiges of Taliban rule.
Ousted from power but not destroyed as a force, thousands of Taliban fighters—
along with members of al-Qaida—disappeared into the mountains of southern and
eastern Afghanistan or crossed the ill-defined border into neighboring Pakistan. The
U.S. military mounted a major effort to locate bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad
Omar, the Taliban leader, but to no avail. During the fighting, bin Laden was believed
to have taken refuge in a rugged area of eastern Afghanistan known as Tora Bora, but
an intense manhunt failed to find him. For years afterward, U.S. officials said they
believed bin Laden and his key aides were still in hiding along the Afghanistan-
Pakistan border. Frustrated U.S. officials offered a $25 million reward for information
leading to bin Laden’s capture, but as of 2007 had no takers.
Bonn Agreement
With fighting ongoing, UN officials and diplomats from the United States and other
countries began the process of putting together a new government for Afghanistan. An
initial meeting took place in October in Pakistan, the base of numerous anti-Taliban
groups. In late November, the German government flew more than thirty representa-
tives of major Afghan ethnic, tribal, and political groups to Bonn for a conference to
develop an interim government. Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister
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