What Endures From Operation Enduring Freedom

By Patrick Skinner

Patrick Skinner is the Director of Special Projects for The Soufan Group. He is a former CIA Case Officer, with extensive experience in source handling and source networks, specializing in counter-terrorism issues. In addition to his intelligence experience, he has law enforcement experience with the US Air Marshals and the US Capitol Police, as well as search and rescue experience in the US Coast Guard.

Fourteen years ago this week, the United States began “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan, with the purpose of eliminating the threat of al-Qaeda and toppling the Taliban. Yet today, the Taliban are surging across much of the country and al-Qaeda still lingers in the eastern border regions of Afghanistan. Despite the expenditure of more than a trillion U.S. dollars and the loss of more than 2,000 U.S. personnel, it is violent extremism—and not freedom—that endures in Afghanistan.

From a counterinsurgency and counterterrorism standpoint, the situation in Afghanistan is more perilous for both the Afghan and U.S. government than at any time since 2001. Kunduz, the fifth largest city in the country—and a symbolic city for both the Taliban and al-Qaeda—fell to the Taliban last week; that the Afghan National Army (ANA) took most of it back this week doesn’t negate that it fell in the first place. As was the case in Iraq, the decades-long U.S. effort to form an effective national military in Afghanistan has failed, and for the same reasons: providing training and equipment doesn’t do much when the bureaucracy and government is completely corrupt, inept, or both.

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