The Northern Alliance tried but failed to form a unified government. Instead the country broke out in civil war between the many different factions. The civil war raged on until 1996 when the Pakistan backed Taliban took over government control and the mujahedeen withdrew from Kabul.
Over the years Pakistan, with funding and support from the US and Saudi Arabia, had been setting up Islamic schools, known as madrassas, among the millions of Afghan Pashtun refugees from southeast Afghanistan who had fled the Soviets to Pakistan.
Many of these refugees during the 1980's were young boys when they fled with their families. By the early 1990's they were young adults. Many of them had become radicalized Sunnis in the madrassas and they joined what became the Taliban.
The US had turned a blind eye to the rise of the Taliban. They also turned a blind eye to Osama bin Laden who had worked for the CIA during the war against the Soviets. Osama and his family's construction company had built tunnels and caves in Afghanistan from which to fight the Soviets. He also built training camps for the Arab legions that were recruited from the Middle East.
In 1989 the US had a chance to walk away from Afghanistan but it didn't take it. The US could have accepted Gorbachev's peace plan. It might have meant a more stable Afghanistan with a secular government.
The government of the PDPA in Afghanistan had accomplished many of the goals the US says it favors now. Women were attending school. Women were accepted into the workforce. Women were not forced to wear the burka. There was peace and security for the population. A secular government was determined to bring Afghanistan into the modern age. Islamic fundamentalists were marginalized.
Instead of accepting responsibility for setting Afghanistan backwards after the Soviets left, the US would rather promote the myth that it "walked away" from Afghanistan. The US and the political pundits would rather believe that Afghanistan was a victim of benign neglect from the US. This myth has been widely spread by the fictionalized Hollywood movie "Charlie Wison's War" staring Tom Hanks. (HERE )
According to foreign correspondent for the Guardian Jonathan Steele: "The problem was not that the West 'walked away' from Afghanistan after the Russians withdrew in 1989, as one of the oldest myths has it. The West stayed in the game and maintained the wrong strategy, cynically blocking every chance for a negotiated end to the Afghan civil war. The United States bears a heavy burden of guilt for that policy, and has suffered greatly from the blowback of its shortsighted support for the fundamentalists who became al Qaeda and the mujahedin who turned into the Taliban"..Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground by Jonathan Steele (page 395).
Ever since the US invaded Afghanistan, after blaming the Taliban for the responsibility of harboring 911-Terrorist Osama bin Laden, the US has vowed that it would not "walk away" and abandon Afghanistan a second time like it supposedly did after the Soviets left. This myth that the US simply packed up its secret CIA war and walked away and forgot all about the aftermath is dangerous. It is what keeps the war going now.
So, when the US and NATO lowered their flags at the Afghanistan Combat Command Center on December 08, 2014 they vowed not to "make the same mistake of abandoning Afghanistan again".
Instead, in the words of then Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel: US boots will remain on the ground in Afghanistan to "protect the tremendous progress the U.S. has accomplished over the past 13 years". He and Obama have vowed that the war and chaos will go on for another decade. (HERE )
What President Obama and the US should have learned from the history of Afghanistan is that it is the war that provides the breeding ground for terrorists.
(Article changed on March 1, 2015 at 11:09)
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