power these extremists sheltered Osama bin Laden and his training camps that
produced the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
After the 9/11/2001 attacks and in response to U.S. demands, the Taliban
government offered to hand bin Laden over to a third nation. The United States
declined the offer, calling it inadequate.^24 Instead, within a month, we began
bombing Taliban forces on behalf of the Northern Alliance, enemies of the
Taliban. With our aid the Alliance won a quick victory. As Afghans, members
of the Alliance were able to differentiate between Taliban supporters and other
Afghans. However, distracted by preparations for its upcoming war on Iraq,
the Bush administration then lost focus on capturing Osama bin Laden and on
securing Afghanistan as a neutral or favorable state. Those mistakes in early
2002 still haunted the United States five years later, as bin Laden remained at
large and the Afghan government had little control over much of Afghanistan.^25
Only one textbook, Pageant, tells that the United States had supported the
Islamic fundamentalists in their battle against Afghanistan’s communist gov-
ernment. Pageant joins other books in stating, inaccurately, that the Taliban
flatly refused to hand over bin Laden. Otherwise, however, most textbooks
give a compact and reasonably accurate account of how the United States with
the Northern Alliance brought down the Taliban government. They do note that
Osama bin Laden got away. Perhaps we should not be surprised that their
accounts are accurate: our intervention in Afghanistan was justified and
effective, at least at first.^26