Timeline: U.S. War in Afghanistan

The United Nations Security Council adopts Resolution 1267, creating the so-called al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee, which links the two groups as terrorist entities and imposes sanctions on their funding, travel, and arms shipments. The UN move follows a period of ascendancy for al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, who guided the terror group from Afghanistan and Peshawar, Pakistan, in the late 1980s, to Sudan in 1991, and back to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. The Taliban, which rose from the ashes of Afghanistan’s post-Soviet civil war, provides al-Qaeda sanctuary…

The Legacy Of Failure In Afghanistan Starts In 1979, Not 2001- OpEd

A decade ago, John Lamberton Harper, a professor of US Foreign Policy and European Studies at Johns Hopkins in Bologna, Italy published an indispensable history of the first cold war (The Cold War, Oxford University Press, 2011) in which he described the origins of what became known as “the Carter doctrine.” The Carter Doctrine pledged US military action against any state that attempted to gain control of the Persian Gulf. As Quincy Institute president Andrew Bacevich has pointed out it “implied the conversion of the Persian Gulf into an informal…