Afghan policemen stand near a pile of burning opium narcotics on the outskirts of Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Omid Khanzada/PA Images. All rights reserved.After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, there was probably no way of stopping the United States from going to war in Afghanistan to terminate the Taliban regime and crush al-Qaida. The sheer impact of the strikes, at a time when the vision of a New American Century was at the heart of the George W Bush administration, made what followed near inevitable. Bush's response to the horror had support from many European governments, and he soon declared war on an “axis of evil” with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq the next in his sights (see "From Afghanistan to Iraq?", 14 October 2001).
It is worth remembering, though, that a few voices in the US and in western Europe foresaw a long drawn-out war in Afghanistan. They argued that the attacks should be treated as appalling acts of transnational criminality, and dealt with through the rule of law, however long that took. Going to war, it was said, would give al-Qaida what it wanted. The very first of this series of columns made this argument:
A few voices argued that the attacks should be treated as appalling acts of transnational criminality, and dealt with through the rule of law, however long that took.
