It demonstrated that doing anything other than saying "how high?" when asked to jump by the US is unhealthy—if an only if you don't have nukes, anything resembling real air defenses, or a special economic relationship with the US. If any of those are true than you can just do whatever.
I would submit this wasn't a lesson worth spending so many lives and so much money to teach, seeing as everyone already knew that (see: the 80s and 90s). If we wanted to send a novel message we'd have hit countries that matter, and/or pumped all those Afghanistan and Iraq war dollars into renewable energy.
So, it was either a huge strategic blunder or was mostly for the purposes of directing anger away from said countries that matter while probably also hitting the Afghans for mostly-unrelated and unstated reasons. Or it was both.
Nothing is certain but IMO the whole Al Qaida narrative is questionable. Now, it looks like we're there for heavy metals / opium / contracting $$$ and to possibly block China from exerting further influence in the region.
In hindsight (actually, even it seemed even at the time) it was probably better to offer a more mature presentation to the world community about what we knew about Al Qaeda, why we believed some of its associates to be in Afghanistan, etc.
Rumsfeld and Bush didn't across as authors of some thought-out strategy; they seemed like buffoons. Underground fortresses? [0] Watch this drive? [1]
As it is, most of the world now doesn't believe that the US had any idea what it was doing. We also now know that some well-connected Saudis were directly responsible for some of the planning of the attack.
So I don't think that this "strategic value" panned out in the slightest.
I was living in Spain and no one needed the US to explain why they "believed some of Al-Qaeda's associates were in Afghanistan". I'm not sure if you didn't watch the news through that time or what, but the Taliban were very upfront about having Bin Laden.
E.g.: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taliban-wont-turn-over-bin-lade...
They wanted evidence that Bin Laden had anything to do with the attacks (which of course he denied).
Why not deliberatively and carefully provide this evidence to the world instead of rushing into a war? What's the strategic value there?
Alternate view: what was to be gained by deliberatively and carefully providing further details on their intelligence sources for general explanations they'd already offered, when it was palpably obvious the Afghan government had no intention of changing the position they'd held for the last three years that there was no way they were going to betray Bin Laden to Libya, never mind the United States? Where was the advantage to engaging in a war of rhetoric with an government committed to protecting somebody that openly called upon his fellow Muslims to bomb the US, a government whose leader compared the notion of giving up Bin Laden to "the end of Islam" and was obviously going to dismiss any evidence presented as insufficient. (even more obvious with the hindsight of what happened a couple of years later when flimsy presentations of evidence harmed the US case for war in Iraq even before it became clear most of the evidence wasn't true)
It's difficult to argue the US action in Afghanistan solved much (though there are certainly people who have benefited as well as those who have suffered as a result) but it's even more difficult to argue they were in a position where they could show that fatwas against the US and series' of attacks culminating in flying jetliners into buildings didn't have any consequences if you weren't a government but had the tacit support of one.
What are you talking about? Bin Laden took credit for 9/11 immediately and it was pretty clear that they had their training camps in Afghanistan. Nobody denied that.
Iraq was a different situation. to go there the US had to make up things.
Do you actually believe this? If so, you are misinformed.
If you do continue to believe this: which misquoted video are you going to trot out for this claim? The 9/16 video? The 9/28 video? Can you tell me which credible Arabic translator regards either (or any) of these as "[taking] credit"?
Nobody seriously continues to maintain that Bin Laden "took credit for 9/11 immediately."
Perhaps you are talking about the November video (although obviously that's not "immediate")? Even if this video does show Bin Laden (which of course is very much disputed), the person in the video doesn't "take credit" in the typical sense of the phrase.
Both my recollection and Wikipedia (admittedly neither being authoritative) agree that Bin Laden denied involvement for some time after the attacks (Wiki says he didn't claim responsibility until 2004). The Taliban denounced the attacks the day of and, separately, stated Bin Laden wasn't involved (which might seem weird, but there's some background there that makes it less suspicious than it seems, though of course it could have all been deception). They also volunteered that they'd turn him over if we turned up evidence that he'd been involved, on Sept. 13th (again, of course they could have been lying or stalling, just getting the events/statements straight)
The US demand (Sept. 14th) wasn't that they hand over Bin Laden, it was that they hand over all of Al Qaeda in their territory, all their intelligence on them, and Bin Laden. Given that there were a lot of fighters on their side of the civil war who'd been through Al Qaeda camps, this was probably impossible to do without losing the civil war, between the loss of manpower, the risk (I'd hazard it was a near-certainty) of opening a new and dangerously ill-defined front in the civil war, and the loss of said training resources/facilities. It was never going to happen, and we'd been considering covertly or overtly pitching in with the other side of their civil war for a few months prior (that part I didn't know until just a few minutes ago) anyway.
[EDIT] reading over the sequence of events and the public statements of both sides the Taliban comes off as even more reasonable than I remember them seeming at the time, which was already "fairly reasonable". Could have all been lies, of course, but if you just look at the public statements and the timeline of events—how quickly it escalated—just, wow. At the very least it was terrible PR management on the US' part that we came off looking like unhinged lunatics compared with such genuine shitbags as the Taliban.
"Well, we had thousands of civilian and US military casualties, but we got Bin Laden! It was totally worth it!"
Now I'm aware of a host of reasons for us to be there, none of them good. Of course we're in Afghanistan for some purpose.
[1] personally, my suspicions that the claims that this organization was so huge and capable and dangerous, yet had only just now managed anything so big and had totally failed to achieve any of the more obvious follow-on attacks, smelled a bit of BS (that is, its size and capabilities were being wildly exaggerated) were confirmed when IIRC Rumsfeld went on the news with a diagram of some GI Joe playset-style giant underground base thing that couldn't conceivably have been built in secret due to its scale and equipment, and claimed that Bin Laden had "not one, but several" of these obviously-fantasy supervillain lairs hidden in Afghanistan. That they were clearly lying about the popular war that was an easy sell definitely colored how I received their later pitch on Iraq. Not that it mattered.
It's shocking now to watch. How did anyone ever buy this? I remember being 18 at the time and thinking it was completely ludicrous. I wonder if anyone seriously believed it or if it was just the story that the media needed to hear to feel less sheepish about acting like this war made any sense.
Man, I went to Wikipedia because I was curious whether the timeline and events I had in my head for the early let-the-inspectors-back-in demands and the later, infamous leave-or-die "ultimatum" Bush leveled against Hussein right before Iraq invasion was correct (there's very little about all that, and I found some material on the ultimatum itself but never the actual word "ultimatum", which is weird since that's what everyone called it at the time and a big deal was made of it) and now I'm all pissed off again that Bush & Co. aren't in prison for life, from reading all the war lead-up material, including some of the suspected-at-the-time-and-now-confirmed stuff about how they were planning to invade no matter what. Wow, there are some emotions I hadn't felt in a while. Nostalgic, I guess.
Like this article, from 1993, about the 'Anti-Soviet warrior' Bin Laden:
http://www.businessinsider.com/1993-independent-article-abou...
I find it fascinating.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/10/hamid-karzai...
The Taliban never even attempted to hide the fact that they harbored Bin Laden. Not sure if that partially answers your question.
Which was of course a-OK for the US, they did not want OBL, they wanted to invade.
The Taliban had spent the last three years refusing multiple countries' requests to extradite Bin Laden for other bombings and was lead by a man married to one of Bin Laden's daughters who compared the notion of handing over Bin Laden as a betrayal akin to the "end of Islam"
Although you might be correct on all your points, it glosses over the fact there might actually be no proof at all.
There wasn't one.
You probably mean the Taliban, but while they may have been the largest of several de facto or putative governments in Afghanistan at the time, they were never the government of Afghanistan.
The whole Al Qaida thing is murky with CIA engineering and scapegoating. Maybe I sound like a conspiracy theorist, I don't know. They were a pretty convenient foil for us to invade a whole bunch of countries that we had no business invading.
I have an American friend here in Groningen ( NL ) who has been living here for about 30 years now.
In the eighties he was stationed in Germany. Due to the thawing relationship between the US and the USSR a meet and greet between Russian and American soldiers was organised. He discovered they were ordinary guys, not monsters. They talked intelligence : both groups had knowledge about weapon systems of their enemies.
It opened his eyes, he left the army and stayed in our beautiful city.
The cold war too, was just 'a story line'.
The Afghan government at the time offered sanctuary to Al Qaeda, refusing to hand over its members after they had declared war on the U.S., attacked USS Cole, hijacked four civilian aircraft and crashed them into the World Trade CEnter & the Pentagon, killing thousands; the strategic purpose of invading Afghanistan was to demonstrate to every country that shielding those who commit acts of war against the United States is itself an act of war against the United States — and that being in a state of war with the United States is an unhealthy condition.
What's the strategic purpose of staying in Afghanistan? 'You broke it, you fix it': having invaded, having destroyed the previous government, it is our responsibility to build a functioning government. Additionally, we desire to prevent the resumption of conditions similar to those which enabled the rise to power of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the first place.