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Gareth Porter has an excellent piece up on IPS, "Fiction of Marja as City Was U.S. Information War," in which he breaks down the media disinformation campaign on the size of Marja:
Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers’ homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.
"It’s not urban at all," an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marja a "rural community".
"It’s a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds," said the official, adding that the homes are reasonably prosperous by Afghan standards.
Porter is right on, and you should read the whole thing for an idea on exactly how these disinfo campaigns are spread, but I’m afraid in the case of Marja, we might be missing the point. We’re complaining that Marja is only an excuse for a propaganda victory while at the same time complaining that the victory won’t be worth anything because it’s not a city. This food is terrible, and such small portions!
This shouldn’t be news to anyone, but Afghans live in rural communities! We’re supposedly there to protect Afghans from the Taliban after all. Rajiv Chandrasekaran described the strategy last year in the Washington Post:
The U.S. strategy here is predicated on the belief that a majority of people in Helmand do not favor the Taliban, which enforces a strict brand of Islam that includes an-eye-for-an-eye justice and strict limits on personal behavior. Instead, U.S. officials believe, residents would rather have the Afghan government in control, but they have been cowed into supporting the Taliban because there was nobody to protect them.
Great, so if the plan is to protect Afghans from the Taliban, then you’ll want to go where Afghans actually live, right? That would be in "a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds," just like the anonymous ISAF official told IPS.
Big cities like Kabul and Herat don’t speak for the entirety of all Afghans, so focusing all of our attention on the major urban centers doesn’t do anything to extend the legitimacy and credibility of the government, much less provide security from the Taliban. President Karzai’s derisive nickname as the "Mayor of Kabul" was one small indicator of just how well the strategy of focusing on city centers, at the cost of conceding rural territory to the Taliban, was working. That is, not working at all. We also can’t discount the effect concentrating on cities had on the Taliban propaganda narrative of western-occupied Kabul (or Islamabad) oppressing the mostly-rural Pashtuns.
In this case, Marja being a small farming community might actually be a positive step. So, ISAF finally went to the population, but are they protecting them? From Military.com:
At least 35 civilians have been killed in the operation, according to the Afghan human rights commission. Spokesman Nader Nadery said insurgent bombs killed more than 10 people, while NATO rocket fire killed at least 14.
Not only are we failing to protect the civilians from the Taliban, but we seem to have killed more Afghans than the militants themselves. Perhaps the Afghans will show their legendary patience, and accept that the government had to massacre 14 of their friends and relatives with rockets in order to have a more peaceful, prosperous Afghanistan. Will they side with Karzai? From the same article above:
"Are you against me or with me?" Karzai asked the elders. "Are you going to support me?"
The men all raised their hands and shouted: "We are with you. We support you."
But…
[Tribal Elders] complained – sometimes shouting – about corruption among former Afghan government officials. They lamented how schools in Marjah were turned into military posts by international forces. They said shops were looted during the offensive, and alleged that innocent civilians were detained by international forces.
But they still said they said they support Karzai, right?
Mohammad Naeem Khan, in his early 30s, said his loyalty is to whoever will provide for him.
"If the Taliban tap me on the shoulder, I will be with them, and if the government taps me on my shoulder I will be with them," Khan said.
So we wind up with the exact same bloody stalemate we’ve had since about 2002. They’ll side with the government, except for when they side with the Taliban. That’s not a victory, propaganda or otherwise.
The problem is not the size of Marja, it could be a teeming industrial metropolis of millions, it still wouldn’t matter as long as we continue using military force and propping up a corrupt, illegitimate government. Until we have a strategy that doesn’t involve violently imposing our pet gangsters’ will on the Afghan people, we’ll have a hard time even distinguishing ourselves from the Taliban, much less convincing the citizens to take our side against them.
I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan.
45 Comments
Huh? What failure? We did what we said we were going to do.
There’s no overarching victory in this first battle, but we did something we wanted to do and hurt the Taliban by doing it.
I do agree that we have an important job on seeing the the usual corruption of Karzai’s government isn’t imposed on the area and think that will be vital in the long-term.
What did we accomplish? We didn’t protect the civilians, we blasted them with rockets, not to mention the Taliban is still capable of attacking (they dropped several mortars on the market earlier). We didn’t provide them with any new services, instead we housed the military in schools and clinics they already had. We didn’t bring the locals into the fold, they’re only with Karzai until the Taliban come back around(like they did in 2005, 2007, and all the other times we “cleared” Helmand), plus the whole problem with ANA soldiers looting the town and snatching locals. How has this hurt the Taliban at all?
Josh, please be more serious. We just took over the area from the Taliban and did so with relative ease and vastly less blood than expected.
You want to call a successful battle a failure two weeks later because we haven’t established significant new services and earned local trust?
Two weeks later?
The Taliban has been hurt because it was easily pushed out, and if you think that dropping mortar shells onto the marketplace is going to win them friends or demonstrates anything other than weakness, good luck.
Wait a sec, macaquerman – Six months ago, you and I had a debate about when it would be appropriate to start evaluating indicators of progress. You told me to give it six months. It’s six months and one week later. You keep on kickin’ the can down the road, friend.
We still don’t have any of the indicators in Afghanistan that the Pashtuns have been won over, or that the effect of U.S. policy in Afghanistan is lowering the temperature or leading to reduced terrorism. In fact, Brookings just put out a report saying:
Re: a “temporary effect only,” Brookings has been saying crap like that for two years now.
In the course of the Marjah op, we killed more civilians so far than the insurgents did, and we’re capping it off by importing a local stooge who spent 4 years in prison for attempted murder. Sorry, the burden of proof is on you here, in my opinion.
Hey, Derrick. Good looking out for your side, but this argument here is about whether Josh gets to label the Marja deal a failure at present, not whether there are indications of progress in Afghanistan.
Those are not the same thing and it is two weeks in Marja. Josh set that up and I haven’t moved it, merely pointed it out.
Protect the civilians? Fail, we killed them with rockets. Taliban are still able to harass and intimidate the locals with violence.
Establish local governance? Fail, we threw out Abdul Rahman Jan, the established local leader with respect and community support, and installed Zahir, a western-backed expat who hasn’t been to Marja in years.
Afghan-ize the Fight? Fail, the non-drug-addicted ANA who actually showed up for duty were incompetent and incapable of conducting maneuvers on their own, that is when they weren’t looting the town and kidnapping the locals.
Establish credibility for the Kabul government? Fail, locals still complain about the corruption, and some like the one I quoted have even gone on the record saying they will rejoin the Taliban if they can provide more than Karzai.
Win any hearts and minds, basic COIN stuff? Fail, civilian casualties as above, plus the use of local schools as military outposts, and as Jim White commented, disappearing locals into opaque and likely illegal detention programs.
Yes, after two weeks, I believe we have the evidence to show it was a failure. The media cheer-leading and US propaganda campaign that Porter was referring to, however, appears to be working quite nicely.
Ooh, Mac…! That had to have left a mark on ya…! ;-)
Josh, I did love the ‘Together-ness in Dari’…!
It is a pitiful state of affairs…! 8-(
not a mark left (on me) at all by it, it’s simply asserting that failure is marked by not having achieved broad success two weeks after winning the opening battle of the campaign.
and I believe you have more belief than evidence.
Meet M-man, our local apologist for imperialist violence.
Your comment is ridiculous. The US of course occupied Marja easily. This is Guerrilla Warfare 101. The guerrillas know when the vastly more powerful occupying military is entering a region. They disappear from the region, fighting only limited harassing engagements. Once the occupying military has established itself in the region, the guerrillas then proceed to cook the military slowly, picking off people at a very low rate. The guerrillas take some casualties as well but they don’t fight a pitched battle against a mechanized, technological military and lose. The guerrillas, likewise, step up their operations in areas where the occupying military is NOT located. Then the occupying military has to organize another major incursion into yet more areas. Process then repeats. The strategic goal of guerrilla warfare against an occupying enemy military of greater power is to make the occupation economically, logistically, and politically unsustainable for the nation that sent the occupying military in. This strategy has worked wonders, for example, Hez’b'allah finally drove the Israelis out of Lebanon in this manner. Unfortunately, the US cannot articulate its winning strategy so effectively, because the only way to win is to fight such a bloody war of attrition against the guerrillas that the US would in effect be decimating or worse the population of Afghanistan itself. That’s a political non-starter for our regime.
There was no “victory” in Marja. The people who planned and executed the operation in Marja are absolute experts in guerrilla warfare and know what I just wrote to you is true 100 times better than any of us ever will. The military planners KNEW what they were doing was running a PR interference campaign for an embattled President during an election year. And they executed the plan nonetheless. These same leaders know very well just how ineffectual the Marja operation was in terms of reaching some sort of strategic “victory” condition in Afghanistan.
Since the Vietnam war, US military commanders have become scholarly experts on this sort of politically-driven military bullshit. They must think as little of Obama as they did of the last guy and the guy before him.
Again, it is truly sad that more people had to die to serve the election-year machinations of American politicians in and around the White House.
and your assertion is only partially true and misses some fairly important things.
They ran because that’s what they should have done. They lose as long as they don’t regain control of the area. As long as they have to set up outside of areas that produce great bundles of revenue for them, that’s a net loss.
I agree with your overall analysis that any insurgency that can be maintained over long intervals is likely not to be defeated by our efforts in Afghanistan, but I doubt that we intend to wage a campaign aimed at eradication over a lengthy period or that we have any desire to maintain a heavy presence in Afghanistan for much longer than a couple of years.
Our own military even aknowledged publicly that this “campaign” against Marja was primarily for political domestic comsumption at home, and that it was not particularly strategic or important.
How can anyone with a halfway functioning sense of morality not call this an abject failure? It was a failure from the moment it was conceived, and many innocent afghans who did nothing wrong other than living in their homes died so that Obama could have his latest shiney PR stunt.
No, our own military did bot acknowledge that. if you’re referencing the WaPo editorial, read it again.
So, for those that support this, what is the military objectives in this entire farce of a war? If it’s the destruction of the Taliban as a whole, how many Taliban are there? How many decades will it take to kill them all if that is the goal since the old “al qaeda” excuse is no longer used? Obviously, the objective is to kill them all, so how will they know when that is accomplished? Why not just fly in planeloads of cash, like was done in Iraq?
I can’t answer for anyone who might think that the objective is to ‘kill them all’, can’t even imagine anyone who would think that desirable or feasible.
Nor can I imagine the source for your thinking that to be possibly true of any great bunch of proponents of continuation.
So if we are not there to kill them, why are we there? They live there. Is our goal to force them to leave their own nation or just to kill them? That is the only two options. Well, that, and bribing the shit out of them with cash like in Iraq. But we all know, once the cash runs out, they tend to go back to doing what they were.
Those are not the only two option. You keep insisting on a tiny universe of possibilities, Horatio.
most simply, consider that we would like to prevent the taliban from being in control of the country and having the ability to use the territory as a gathering and training point for militants.
When pray tell, was that ever the objective? Or better yet, what week was that the objective? I don’t recall at all the Taliban even getting much more than a mention as the initial invasion took place. They were a non important entity. So why do you continue to justify the governments various excuses? Honestly, that is not the excuse they used to invade. The idea of doing what you say, would be equal to someone invading the US to stop Rethuglicans from ever gaining power or being in control. How would that be any more possible than this lunacy in Afghanistan? Militants? There are militants using the US as a training ground. And England. And Europe. And Africa. And, and, and……..that is a losing battle my friend.
beaver, what you recall about the invasion needs refreshment. you could look it up a bit, eh?
No need to Mac. The invasion was to get Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. There was no warbeating drums about the Taliban. That is why people couldn’t figure out what was going on and still can’t. If you have evidence to the contrary I’d love to read it.
Jeezus! Couldn’t this guy just write a blog without plugging his stupid Facebook fan-page?
So the brand new designated “Afghanistan Blogger” starts off by completely missing the point of Gareth Porter’s article, which is that there was no there there until NATO threw down a challenge to the Taliban, and they of course turned the whole place into a minefield!
NATO didn’t “go where Afghans actually live,” as the Josh Mull claims. They created an battleground where Afghans formerly lived, before NATO and the Taliban bombed it to smithereens.
But to understand anything about Marjah, Josh Mull would have to stop relentlessly shilling for his Facebook fan-page and actually take a look at the place, for example in my diary from February 12, where I scrutinized the Google maps of Marjah and reached exactly the same conclusion as Gareth Porter.
No there there!
And now there’s less than nothing! Just rubble where most of those scattered family compounds used to be!
Jeepers, Jacob, easy up. Given the overall quality of Porter’s work, it’s not at all unlikely that he got the idea from you. Porter is that lame.
But both you and Porter miss quite a bit of what is there in the area.
And if Josh wants to mention his Facebook page or anything else, where do you get off grousing about it?
You certainly provided links to your personal site as well.
If there weren’t any Taliban in Marja, who were all those hundreds of militants who fled in advance of the ISAF incursion? What about the sniper fire, IEDs, and “complex, organized” commando attacks that slowed the NATO advance, who was that? Who are these militants lobbing mortars into town days after the operation is supposedly over? Do we think these village elders are just imagining what it would be like when they say they’ll rejoin the Taliban?
No one reasonable is contending that Marja had no Taliban in it, and certainly Porter didn’t come anywhere close to that. He was dissecting the media disinformation, and I used that as a springboard to talk about why it doesn’t even matter vis a vis success in Marja.
And yes, I want people to get involved with ReThink Afghanistan on Facebook, or however they want to do it. Both the FB page and the website are chock full of resources for you to get involved in ending the war in Afghanistan, and I will continue to remind readers to take advantage of that.
Josh Mull can’t choose to be deep, but he could choose to be honest, instead of pretending (twice) in his reply that I claimed there were no Taliban in Marjah before Operation Moshtarak.
And apart from distorting what I wrote, he swallows NATO propaganda without a hiccup!
Did you count them, Josh Mull? Did you observe any of them? Is there any evidence whatsoever that “hundred of militants” fled, except for some NATO press-releases?
On the contrary, if you had made an honest effort to understand what I wrote, or even understood Gareth Porter’s transparent article, you would also understand that there was nowhere for so many militants to flee from.
Porter wrote that Marjah was…
Is Josh Mull pretending that “hundreds of militants” fled from “a few clusters of farmers’ homes,” or is he including most of the southern Helmand River Valley in his “flight zone?”
Or is his post just a mixture of ignorance and NATO propaganda?
But the worst aspect of Josh Mull’s mess is that he promotes the lethal assumption of some kind of bright line between Taliban and other Afghans. This propaganda bullshit has already cost the lives of tens of thousands of Afghans, in spite of being constantly contradicted by all the citizens of Afghanistan from Hamid Karzai to the latest refugees created by Operation Moshtarak.
Returning to Operation Moshtarak, it was obvious from the beginning that NATO’s intention wasn’t to scare away “militants” before the assault on Marjah, but exactly the opposite, and the intention of all that pre-assault publicity was attracting resistance, and creating a spectacular battleground for a spectacular “victory,” and the “Taliban,” meaning anyone in Afghanistan willing to resist foreign invaders (and who isn’t?) began planting mines and once again demonstrating their unshakeable resolve to resist foreign occupation, just as they have resisted every other foreign invader for at least 3000 years.
I agree with ya to a point, Jacob…! But, I do ask ya to not paint Josh with such a broad brush…! 8-(
Josh, Gareth is a personal fave of mine…! But, another Josh… Joshua Foust has been all over the Marjeh population size issue from the get-go…! ;-)
I believe very strongly that this is the key disclosure in the AP article you link. My last few diaries (click on my name for the list) have focused on the shell games that have been played in Afghanistan, where McChrystal makes grand, sweeping statements about how careful US forces are being in Afghanistan, while he has no official (but probably considerable unofficial) control over the JSOC forces that are responsible for the worst acts carried out in our names: the secret imprisonment of innocent civilians and sometimes careless or reckless targeting of drones. Marjeh is worth watching very closely in the coming weeks to see how many reports emerge on imprisonment of innocent civilians and how long it takes for those detained to have any sort of status hearing. The loyalties of the locals can be lost completely if enough influential families have innocent members disappear without explanation.
This Institute of The Study of War report(pdf) stated…
The offensive on Marja was, I believe, an attempt by the Obama administration to change the subject from the spectacular failure of the domestic health care “reform” legislation. The attempt didn’t work.
The offensive in Marja was purely about news cycle management for the Obama team. It’s really a shame a bunch more people had to get killed in order for American politicians to play their games during an election year.
The Taliban are not a foreign force in Afghanistan. The Karzai regime, however, is a foreign creation, and the US is a foreign force. The Taliban are a brutal, ugly, backwards bunch, but they are more a part of Afghanistan than the US, and they will remain in Afghanistan long after the US has gone.
We should just leave, everybody knows that. Then you guys can argue about something else. Maybe angels on a pin?
Blah.
This is our greatest victory since our heroic rescue of Grenada. Kudos to the President. Good job Generals! Worth every penny of our tax money.
I can’t wait for the Hollywood Blockbuster.
Wasn’t the taking and holding of the cities while they were cut to pieces in the countryside the same strategy the Soviet Union pursued for all of those years? Terrific! Look what happened to them.
How many more years does this BS have to go on, with repeated excuses and justifications for everything that happens? The world’s sole super power can’t defeat a ragtag bunch of people because they can’t figure out who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. How reassuring. This supposed war is the equivalent of a war on catholics. How do you tell who the catholics are? Oh there’s one over there! Um, sure does look like a catholic, doesn’t he? What the hell are we all doing in Afghanistan anyway? Taliban? Taliban when converted to english means “student”….so there is a clear victory in sight. Just kill all the students.
Taking and holding cities would be an improvement over our current position – outside of Kabul, what city does the Afghan gov control?
Controlling the countryside via native locals makes sense – but you need a base from which to support those local police – and not having total control of any major cities and towns other than Kabul makes this impossible. Gov in a box installing in rural areas only works if we control the major population centers from which to support the rural “boxes”.
The USSR approach is the only one that works – and it can not work if some other state opposes the approach as the US did in the late 70′s and 80′s. Now the Pakistan ISI (secret service which seems not controlled by the Pakistan gov) is opposing us and supporting the Taliban in the belief that this is a way to annoy India. If the ISI does not reverse position we need to just get out – the way the USSR did.
At the end of the day, no approach is going to work. Any nation who’s population is invaded, will fight for the rest of their lives if necessary. The more innocents that die, the more stubborn the population will be. It’s really that simple. No nation has the right to invade any other, unless it’s attacked first. Afghanistan never attacked anyone. Most of these people’s goals in life are just to survive. It’s a travesty, and leadership from every nation involved, including Canada, should be arrested and put on trial for crimes against humanity. This is no different than the wiping out of Indian savages. Throughout history, any aggressive nation has always been trialed in some way. When is it going to happen here? If Germany was wrong to invade other nations, so are we.
Nice opening column, Josh. To me, the most significant news item during the Marja campaign was that the U.N. has accused the NATO forces of excessive militarization of development efforts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/world/asia/18aid.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/world/asia/05afghan.html
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/opinion/once-the-shootings-done-politics-need-to-do-the-talking-about-afghanistan/361348
Since I don’t really subscribe to the notion that dropping the place flat will work, nor that if development is done in a war torn country it can be done completely devoid of any sort of peace operation, the fact that the military is interfering with the development process is not a good thing. Maybe you can address it in a future column.
Given the number of drones circling the Afghanitan skies an the ever escalating number of “colateral damage”, someone should be protecting the Afghan citizens from the U.S.
What an immoral, unjustifiable waste.
The residents of Marja were not esactly thrilled with their newly installed mayor fresh off the plane from Germany and the first time he set foot in his new town.
Y’all need to examine the area referred to as Marja on Google Earth, a free program you can download from Google if you don’t have it. Enter Marjeh in the search box because the program won’t recognize Marja. You will discover that the city center is a large empty dustbin with a few clusters of mudbrick buildings located on the perimeter. Farms appear in irrigated areas farther out from the open center area. The population of Marjeh depends on where its boundaries are located and I cain’t figure that out from looking at the satellite view, but I can assure y’all that there ain’t no 50,000 to 80,000 people living in the clusters of mudbrick houses. I estimate less than 1,000.
An much larger and more prosperous looking town is Lashkar Gah, which is 15 miles ENE from Marjeh as the crow flies. Wiki has several photos of the place. It looks like a small city.
Kandahar, McChrystal’s ultimate objective in this initial pacification and gentrification effort to get some big time love from the Afghan people is a little over 100 miles E of Marjeh. It’s much larger than Lashkar Gah.
No one has convinced me that any foreign military invader will be welcome anywhere in Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world. The basic survival principle suggests that most people will tolerate the invader to avoid getting killed, but never accept that it has a right to remain indefinitely. People will assume that it will leave and go somewhere else eventually. People who were a little too friendly with the occupiers will be known as collaborators and likely face retribution followed by life settling back into its former patterns.
The fundamental principle, or prime directive in Star Trek speak, is don’t interfere in local affairs.
We don’t have a “side” in Afghanistan
“Until we have a strategy that doesn’t involve violently imposing our pet gangsters’ will on the Afghan people, we’ll have a hard time even distinguishing ourselves from the Taliban, much less convincing the citizens to take our side against them.”
Any strategy that needs troops to implement involves the violent imposition of our will. We have enough trouble sorting out who’s a gangster/bankster, versus who the “good guys” are in the governance of our own country, so it’s not as if it would even be possible for us to violently impose the will only of Afghan “good guys”. The reason we don’t allow ourselves, when dealing with our own politics, to decide that some people are bad guys, to be dealt with by killing them (however much, God knows, some people on a little list I could supply you, really, really, seem to need killing), and that other people are good guys, is that we recognize that, not only is that vastly oversimplified thinking, any attempt to implement such a strategy, even if guided by a wisdom we don’t possess, would meet with violent resistance from whomever got the bad guy designator. We would have a permanent and ongoing civil war. Our politics would look like Lebanon in its darkest days, or, well, like Afghanistan right now.
Countries do sometimes come to such a pass, that it does become necessary to reach and enforce judgments on which political actors are the “bad guys”, those who need to be killed, if only so that the killing can stop. But precisely at such times, and with such judgments, foreigners are the last people to be making those judgments. We don’t, never will, know as much as the people of Afghanistan themselves about how their country works, and doesn’t work, and needs to be allowed to not work. But the real nub of the matter is that we can never take the responsibility for such judgments, because it’s not our country, and we won’t have to live with the results.
It’s their country, for better or for worse. If there’s one thing they themselves, with no ignorant and irresponsible foreigners butting in, get to decide, and have to decide, completely on their own, it’s who needs killing in their country. We keep butting into business that’s not ours, and sooner or later all of them will agree that, whoever else in their country needs killing, certainly every American in their country needs it, and as the first priority.
Aloha, Josh and fellow Seminarians…! ;-)
I’ve got a fresh diary for ya’ll’s perusal…!
really, cb, you’re not just kidding me? you really don’t know that the Taliban were repeatedly warned, told, and finally refused the demand that they give up bin Laden or be overthrown by war?
Start with the UN Resolutions insisting that the Taliban turn bin Laden over. That was a year or two before 9/11 IIRC.
http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N99/300/44/PDF/N9930044.pdf?OpenElement
In 2000, the UN repeated that the Taliban had to turn over bin Laden ad associates and close all the terrorist training camps and a couple of other things.
http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N00/806/62/PDF/N0080662.pdf?OpenElement
Immediately after 9/11, serves notice that the US has the right to attack as an exercise of the right of self-defense.
http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N01/557/43/PDF/N0155743.pdf?OpenElement
The US went on demanding that the Taliban turn over bin Laden.
sept 17 Colin Powell was quoted as clear as day.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/taliban-are-given-an-ultimatum-hand-over-bin-laden-or-face-attack-751974.html
Sept 20, President Bush, in a televised speech before Congress, was again as clear as day.
http://www.unwire.org/unwire/20010921/18416_story.asp
After the invasion the UN “welcomed” the overthrow of the Taliban and authorized the security force that bolsters the current government and is designed to prevent the Taliban’s return.
http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N01/708/55/PDF/N0170855.pdf?OpenElement
I hope this small slice of evidence helps to convince you that there was indeed some war drumming very clearly calling for a taliban beatdown.
Your first 3 links, and the final one are hosed.
You sure? They’re working when I hit ‘em
The possibly-afflicted links are:
UN RES 1267
1333
1373
and 1386
Thanks newt. Must be more of my internet incompetence. I would link ‘em up again if I hadn’t erased the stuff I was working from.