Between US President George W Bush announcing "Wanted: Dead or Alive" in September 2001 and incumbent Barack Obama proclaiming "Justice has been done" in May 2011, the United States spent most of the last decade hunting down one man.
The pursuit of Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader who orchestrated the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, ended when US Navy Seals killed him in May in Pakistan. While the US was hunting down bin Laden, the Taliban government was ousted and Afghanistan invaded.
After a decade of fighting, thousands of lives have been lost, millions displaced and billions of dollars spent. But Afghanistan is in tatters and more unstable and violent than ever. "Each year, the situation has worsened," retired general and security analyst Abdul Hadi Khalid said.
There are currently 130,000 international troops and almost 300,000 Afghan security personnel taking on the Taliban movement, which has been fighting since its ouster from Kabul in 2001. In recent months Taliban have carried out increasingly complex attacks, proving they are still a force to be reckoned with. Since March, three top police officials, a mayor, a presidential adviser, a brother of incumbent President Hamid Karzai and a former president, have been killed.
Three high-profile attacks on Kabul since June, including the 21-hour siege on September 13 targeting the fortified US Embassy and Nato headquarters, shows the precarious nature of the security situation. Last week, former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was the head of a peace council seeking talks with the Taliban, was killed by a suicide bomber in his Kabul house.
The Taliban have not claimed responsibility, but his killing has cast doubt on any negotiations. The Taliban's show of strength comes at a time when the international forces - two-thirds of whom are from the US - have announcced they are to leave by 2014 The Afghan invasion is the longest and most expensive war the US has ever fought, and one of its most strategically challenging conflicts.
It has cost Washington at least 444 billion dollars, according to a Brown University report. To date, 1,784 US soldiers have been killed, according to the website iCasualties.org. The focus has shifted from hunting down the al Qaeda network to building a country that could not be used as terrorist haven again. But the cost is no longer easy to bear for the US with its current economic problems.
Despite billions of dollars in aid, the Afghan government and state institutions "remain fragile and unable to provide good governance, deliver basic services to the majority of the population or guarantee human security," the International Crisis Group (ICG) said in a report in August.
Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, is still mired in a seemingly endless war, with the insurgency spreading to previously peaceful areas. Military gains are fragile, officials said, and according to some analysts the international forces and the insurgency have reached a strategic stalemate. No one will succeed with military force alone, said Masoom Stanikzai, head of the peace council secretariat.
One former Taliban who served as envoy to the United Nations said the spirit of the foot soldiers in the armed opposition is now "very high." "They are not tired," said Abdul Hakim Mujahid. "But at the same time, the senior leaders of the insurgency and politically mature people have strong tendency for a political solution." "They do want to end the fighting in the country."
But there is a fear that any progress achieved in the last 10 years could be lost if negotiations are rushed. "A rush to the exit and ill-conceived plans for reconciliation with the insurgency by the US and its allies could threaten such gains as have been achieved in education, health and women's rights since the Taliban's ouster," the ICG said in its report.
In another report this month, the United States Institute of Peace criticised the negotiations for focusing exclusively on the Taliban laying down their arms and the US withdrawing. "This agenda does not address significant root causes of the current conflict, such as government corruption and ethnic tensions." Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, a former Taliban member and foreign minister, said Afghanistan is going through a dangerous time. "This war is without any mercy or direction," he said. Khalid said the culture of violence is ingrained in Afghan society and that three decades of war has destroyed the social fabric. "It is hard to mend after all these years."
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