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The Soviet army in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Dec. 31, 1979. Francois Lochon/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images hide caption

The Soviet army in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Dec. 31, 1979.

The collapse of the Afghan government and the Taliban's recapture of power came after a blitz by the militant group that stunned many Afghans and the world. It is the latest chapter in the country's nearly 42 years of instability and bitter conflict.

Afghans have lived through foreign invasions, civil war, insurgency and a previous period of oppressive Taliban rule. Here are some key events and dates from the past four decades.

December 1979

Following upheaval after a 1978 Afghan coup, the Soviet military invades Afghanistan to prop up a pro-Soviet government.

1980

Babrak Karmal is installed as Afghanistan's Soviet-backed ruler. Groups of guerrilla fighters known as mujahideen or holy warriors mount opposition and a jihad against Soviet forces. The ensuing war leaves about 1 million Afghan civilians and some 15,000 Soviet soldiers dead.

Millions of Afghans begin fleeing to neighboring Pakistan as refugees. The U.S., which had previously been aiding Afghan mujahideen groups, and Saudi Arabia covertly funnel arms to the mujahideen via Pakistan through the 1980s.

Afghan refugees are shown in a camp on Kohat Road outside of Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1980. Peter Bregg/AP hide caption

Afghan refugees are shown in a camp on Kohat Road outside of Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1980.

1983

President Ronald Reagan welcomes Afghan fighters to the White House in 1983, and mujahideen leader Yunus Khalis visits the Oval Office in 1987.

Former President Ronald Reagan meets in the Oval Office in 1983 with Afghan fighters opposing the Soviet Union. Bettmann/Getty Images hide caption

Former President Ronald Reagan meets in the Oval Office in 1983 with Afghan fighters opposing the Soviet Union.

1986

The CIA supplies Stinger antiaircraft missiles to the mujahideen, allowing them to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships.

An Afghan guerrilla handles a U.S.-made Stinger anti-aircraft missile. David Stewart Smith/AP hide caption

An Afghan guerrilla handles a U.S.-made Stinger anti-aircraft missile.

1987

Mohammad Najibullah, groomed by the Soviets, replaces Karmal as president.

1988

The Geneva peace accords are signed by Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Pakistan, and Soviet forces begin their withdrawal.

Feb. 15, 1989

The last Soviet to leave Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Boris Gromov, walks with his son on the bridge linking Afghanistan to Uzbekistan over the Amu Darya River. The Soviet commander crossed from the Afghan town of Khairaton. Tass/AP hide caption

The last Soviet to leave Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Boris Gromov, walks with his son on the bridge linking Afghanistan to Uzbekistan over the Amu Darya River. The Soviet commander crossed from the Afghan town of Khairaton.

The last Soviet soldier leaves Afghanistan.

1992

Following the withdrawal of Soviet forces and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Najibullah's pro-communist government crumbles. He is blocked from leaving Afghanistan and takes refuge at the Kabul United Nations compound, where he remains for more than four years.

Mujahideen leaders enter the capital and turn on each other. Refugees continue to flee in huge numbers to Pakistan and Iran.

The presidential palace in Kabul is severely damaged after being hit by tank shells and rockets fired by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami fighters. Udo Weitz/AP hide caption

The presidential palace in Kabul is severely damaged after being hit by tank shells and rockets fired by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami fighters.

Kabul, largely spared during the Soviet war, comes under brutal attack by forces loyal to mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Much of the city is left in rubble. The national museum is rocketed and looted. Some 50,000 people are killed.

1994

The Taliban, ultraconservative Afghan student-warriors emerging from mujahideen groups and religious seminaries in Pakistan and Afghanistan, take over the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, promising to restore order and bring greater security. They quickly impose their harsh interpretation of Islam on the territory they control.

A Taliban fighter guards a road southeast of Kabul in 1995. Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

A Taliban fighter guards a road southeast of Kabul in 1995.

May 1996

Saudi-born al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden arrives in Afghanistan after being expelled from Sudan, and eventually ingratiates himself with the one-eyed Taliban supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar. Bin Laden had previously aided Afghan mujahideen forces during the Soviet war years as one of many so-called "Afghan Arabs" who joined the anti-Soviet fight.

Osama bin Laden speaks at a press conference in Khost, Afghanistan, in 1998. Mazhar Ali Khan/AP hide caption

Osama bin Laden speaks at a press conference in Khost, Afghanistan, in 1998.

Sept. 26, 1996

The Taliban take over Kabul. They capture Najibullah, the former president, from the U.N. compound, kill him and hang his body from a lamppost.

Taliban rally in Kabul, October 1996. Robert Nickelsberg/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images hide caption

Taliban rally in Kabul, October 1996.

1997-1998

Gaining control over most of the country, the Taliban impose their rule, forbidding most women from working, banning girls from education and carrying out punishments including beatings, amputations and public executions. Only three countries officially recognize the Taliban regime: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In August 1998, the U.S. launches cruise missile strikes on Khost, Afghanistan, in retaliation for al-Qaida attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Afghan women wear Taliban-imposed burqas in Kabul. Roger Lemoyne/Liaison/Getty Images hide caption

Afghan women wear Taliban-imposed burqas in Kabul.

1999

The U.N. Security Council imposes terrorist sanctions on the Taliban and al-Qaida.

In December, an Indian Airlines passenger jet, bound from Kathmandu to New Delhi, is hijacked to Kandahar. The Taliban serve as mediators between the hijackers and Indian authorities, who decide to free three terrorists from Indian prisons and hand them over to the hijackers in exchange for the passengers' safety.

March 2001

Rejecting international pleas, the Taliban blow up two 1,500-year-old colossal Buddha statues carved into a mountainside in Bamiyan, saying the statues were "idols" prohibited under Islam.

Afghan Taliban in front of the empty niche that held one of the two giant Buddha statues the Taliban blew up in Bamiyan in March 2001. Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Afghan Taliban in front of the empty niche that held one of the two giant Buddha statues the Taliban blew up in Bamiyan in March 2001.

August 2001

The Taliban put a group of Western aid workers on trial, accusing them of preaching Christianity, a capital offense. Two American women are among the accused.

September 2001

Anti-Taliban Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud is assassinated on Sept. 9 by al-Qaida operatives posing as TV journalists.

After al-Qaida's Sept. 11 attacks in New York City and Washington, the U.S. demands that the Taliban hand over bin Laden. They refuse.

Oct. 7, 2001

An undated file photo shows a U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress heavy bomber. The U.S.-led coalition launched air and missile strikes in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001. U.S. Air Force/Getty Images hide caption

An undated file photo shows a U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress heavy bomber. The U.S.-led coalition launched air and missile strikes in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001.

A U.S.-led coalition launches Operation Enduring Freedom, targeting the Taliban and al-Qaida with military strikes.

November-December 2001

The U.S.-backed Northern Alliance enters Kabul on Nov. 13. The Taliban flee south and their regime is overthrown. In December, Hamid Karzai is named interim president after Afghan groups sign the Bonn Agreement on an interim government. Under that agreement, some warlords are named provincial governors, military commanders and cabinet ministers, as are members of the Northern Alliance. The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force is established under a U.N. mandate.

2003

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signals an end to "major combat activity" in Afghanistan, saying, "We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction and activities."

2004

Afghanistan holds a presidential election, won by Hamid Karzai.

2005

Afghanistan's parliament opens after elections bring in lawmakers including old warlords and faction leaders.

2006

The Taliban seize territory in southern Afghanistan. NATO's ISAF assumes command from the U.S. in the south, something the NATO secretary general calls "one of the most challenging tasks NATO has ever taken on."

2009

Karzai is reelected president.

The U.S. "surge" begins after President Barack Obama orders substantial troop increases in Afghanistan. Obama says that U.S. forces will leave by 2011.

2012

NATO announces it will withdraw foreign combat troops and transfer control of security operations to Afghan forces by the end of 2014.

2013

The Afghan army takes on security operations from NATO forces.

The Obama administration announces plans to start formal peace talks with the Taliban.

2014

After a disputed election, Ashraf Ghani succeeds Karzai as Afghanistan's president. Ghani's rival, Abdullah Abdullah, is named chief executive.

A U.S. soldier walks past burning trucks at the scene of a suicide attack in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province in 2014. Noorullah Shirzada/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

A U.S. soldier walks past burning trucks at the scene of a suicide attack in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province in 2014.

At the end of the year, U.S. and NATO forces formally end their combat missions.

2015

NATO launches its Resolute Support mission to aid Afghan forces. Heavy violence continues as the Taliban step up their attacks on Afghan and U.S. forces and civilians, and take over more territory. At the same time, an Afghan ISIS branch also emerges.

Taliban members and Afghan officials meet informally in Qatar and agree to continue peace talks.

The Taliban make publicly known that Mullah Omar, the group's founder, died years earlier. Mullah Akhtar Mansour is named as the new leader. He is killed the following year in a U.S. drone attack in Pakistan.

2016

The Afghan government grants immunity to former mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, known in the civil war years as the "butcher of Kabul."

2017

Fighting continues between government forces and the Taliban, and attacks attributed to the Taliban and ISIS convulse the country.

2018

President Donald Trump appoints former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad as his special representative to negotiate with the Taliban.

2020

Original post:
A Timeline Of Afghanistan's 4 Decades Of Instability : NPR

For children and adults alike, Star Wars represented the defining film of a generation but most children didnt grow up to lead a paramilitary force as the son of a brutal authoritarian.

From 1995 until his death in Mosul in 2003, Uday Hussein, the erratic eldest son of the countrys former president, led the paramilitary group Fedayeen Saddam, or Saddams Men of Sacrifice.

Saddam admired science fiction movies like Star Wars, but it was Uday who took his admiration of the series to the extreme, infusing elements of the films characters into the Fedayeens uniforms. Made up of the elder Husseins most loyal supporters, the roughly 40,000-strong group adopted one prominent look from the series most notable villain Darth Vader.

Helmets were made of black fibre-glass with a deep neck & ear guard, culminating to a pronounced point to the centre of the peak, according to a description from the Imperial War Museums. Above the right side is fitted a black rubber oval (fitted upside down in this case) showing a silhouette of Saddam Hussein wearing his military style beret.

U.S. troops walk by scattered helmets and ammunition at the former Fedayeen Saddam headquarters in Kut in April 2003. (Wally Santana/AP)

Also on the rubber oval was Arabic writing that translated to The Lord, The Homeland, The Leader. Regardless of appearance, the helmet offered virtually no ballistic value, a lack of protection Darth Vader would no doubt find disturbing.

The helmets were further described as having an impression of being sinister to the civilian population, an appearance that was reflected in the groups ruthless attacks on political opponents and extrajudicial killings, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Uday also employed the group to carry out the beheadings of approximately 200 women as part of an anti-prostitution campaign, according to a State Department report.

In the end, the groups guerrilla attacks on coalition forces following the 2003 invasion may have surprised military leaders and policy makers in Washington, but the Fedayeen Saddams efforts would ultimately not prevent the units dissolution.

Observation Post is the Military Times one-stop shop for all things off-duty. Stories may reflect author observations.

Zamone Z Perez is a rapid response reporter and podcast producer at Defense News and Military Times. He previously worked at Foreign Policy and Ufahamu Africa. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he researched international ethics and atrocity prevention in his thesis. He can be found on Twitter @zamoneperez.

The rest is here:
How Star Wars influenced Uday Husseins paramilitary unit in Iraq

The United States is good at getting involved in wars and not as good at getting out of them.

A year on, the Russia-Ukraine war has no end in sight. The war is at a semi-stalemate, and both Russia and Ukraine are sticking to their demands. Ukraine has been able to defend itself against Russian aggression in large part due to the $29.8 billion worth of weapons and equipment that the US has sent so far. While the US has hit some limits, it is sending ever more advanced weaponry and provides Ukraine with intelligence to help it target Russia more effectively. Ukraine cannot continue the war without Western military and economic support.

All of which raises the question of whether the Russia-Ukraine conflict is entering forever war territory.

The USs post-9/11 wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan turned into decades-long conflicts because the objectives kept shifting, because they were guided by ideological goals, and because they were enabled by legal authorizations that gave policymakers room to expand the wars. The situation in Ukraine is obviously different from US engagement in Iraq or Afghanistan for one, the US does not have troops on the ground in Ukraine. But when I asked former high-ranking military officials and national security experts about the risk of protracted war in Ukraine, they told me that those other forever war factors are currently present in the USs support for the Ukraine war.

The Biden administration does not view the war as endless. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in October, certainly we dont want to see a forever war, and he blames Russian President Vladimir Putin for the wars continuation. But theres a lot of time between here and forever. And in statement after statement after statement, officials describe the USs enduring commitment to Ukraine. (Neither the White House nor the Pentagon replied to interview requests.)

This is going to be a generational conflict between the West and Russia, says historian Michael Kimmage of Catholic University, who has researched Putins strategy in the war. The further the West moves in, the more Putin is going to be motivated to keep on going, he told me. This is going to be the mother of all forever wars, because of the nature of the adversary.

So what can the US learn from its interventions in its Middle East forever wars? In the first year of the Iraq War, a young Gen. David Petraeus said he would repeat the mantra to himself, Tell me how this ends.

These days, Petraeus is retired from active duty and shares on social media daily Ukraine war situation reports from the Institute for the Study of War, where he is a board member. I think the most important question has to do with how one might see this war ending, Petraeus wrote in an email. Related to that is the critical question of what needs to be done to convince Vladimir Putin that the war in Ukraine is not sustainable for Russia on the battlefield in Ukraine and also on the home front in Russia.

But there are other ways of posing the question. Thomas Pickering, a former career ambassador who served in Russia and rose to be undersecretary for political affairs at the State Department, says the potential for a nuclear conflict means the US does have to think about whether it would make sense to try to terminate the war on an advantageous but not perfect basis.

I dont [think] Ukraine has to become a forever war or even a frozen conflict; in fact, we need to do everything that we and our allies and partners can to enable Ukraine and ensure that this does not become a forever war, Petraeus, now a partner at the private equity firm KKR, added.

Talking about how and why Ukraine is becoming a forever war, then, is a fine place to start.

The global war on terrorism was a sprawling and ill-defined project.

After 9/11, the US was responding to an attack on its soil, but then the George W. Bush administration expanded its international campaign to target not just al-Qaeda but the concept of terrorism one that somehow the US is still fighting today. Though President Joe Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, US troops are still in the Middle East, and many aspects of the counterterrorism wars endure.

The way that Bushs interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan began made that possible. Congress approved a joint resolution against threats to the US homeland in 2001 that was so broad that it evolved as the threats did. That vote authorized the use of military force against nations, organizations, or persons connected to the 9/11 attacks, and in 2002, Congress passed another broad authorization on Iraq that two decades later is used to counter the Islamic State terrorist group.

The USs goals in Iraq, for example, ran the gamut of eliminating the risk of purported weapons of mass destruction, regime change, nation-building, countering Iranian influence, and then debilitating ISIS. US troops remain there in 2023. And when there were opportunities to end the initial invasion of Afghanistan like when hundreds of Taliban fighters surrendered to the US the Bush administration rejected them. Even now, 18 months after the US withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan and more than a year after the US assassinated perhaps the last known planner of the 2001 attack, the initial authorization has yet to be repealed.

As Rep. Barbara Lee, the only lawmaker who voted against the authorization of military force in Afghanistan in 2001, warned just days after the 9/11 attacks: We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.

Some of the lessons of the Bush and Obama years seem to have been put into action. Strategists now recognize that a small footprint is better than a massive US presence of hundreds of thousands of troops, and that much can be accomplished by partnering with another countrys military (instead of having boots on the ground). From the first 20 years of the war on terrorism, the US learned well that corruption among recipients of aid is corrosive to US interests. That commanders on the ground offer overly rosy assessments of progress in a self-deceptive process that ends up extending the war is now a truism.

Throughout, the American people are somewhat willing to ignore ongoing US wars, even when US soldiers are deeply involved.

But perhaps what the US ought to have learned from the forever wars is the importance of practicing humility and not underestimating ones enemies. A more difficult lesson to put into practice is the importance of incorporating dialogue and negotiations with adversaries into policy.

Mara Karlin, a top civilian strategist appointed by Biden to the Pentagon, wrote a 2021 book on what the US learned from the post-9/11 wars. In The Inheritance: Americas Military After Two Decades of War, she details how wars without clear ends affect the morale, preparedness, and even civilian control of the military. Karlin warns of the danger of overreacting to threats and attacks, as the United States did in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks and of under-responding, as the United States has done in its persistent inability to recognize and act on the growing security threats posed by China and Russia to the U.S.-led global order over the last decade or so.

Karlin didnt respond to a request for comment. But that a key Pentagon leader in 2021 worried more about a US underreaction to Russia than the potential for another endless war shows how committed a leading strategist in the Biden administration may be toward a long-haul fight.

The striking parallel between the USs long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ongoing war in Ukraine is the rhetoric surrounding the conflict.

The US role in supporting Ukraine has been framed as ideological. Biden from the get-go described the conflict in terms of good versus evil, democracy against autocracy.

Does the US stand for the defense of democracy? Biden asked again in his recent State of the Union address. For such a defense matters to us because it keeps the peace and prevents open season for would-be aggressors to threaten our security and prosperity. And senior State Department official Victoria Nuland wrote in testimony to Congress last month that Ukraines fight is about so much more than Ukraine; it is about the world our own children and grandchildren will inherit.

The Biden administration may believe that. But rhetoric like that is also how wars continue in perpetuity. Its how the objectives creep, the goalposts shift. Ideological struggles are not so easy to win.

By some metrics, the objectives that the US set out to achieve in Ukraine have already been achieved. Christopher Chivvis, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explained that the US in the past year has managed to avoid a direct war with Russia, made Russia suffer a strategic defeat, and kept the NATO alliance unified. Ukraine has also maintained its sovereign independence.

Continued unqualified support is good in the sense that it puts pressure on the Russians to try to moderate their more extreme objectives, Chivvis told me. But its not likely to get the Ukrainians to think seriously about restraining their own war aims, because they see the whole set of Western nations backing them to the hilt.

Though many experts told me that its time to begin plotting the contours of talks between Russia and Ukraine, neither side sees value in negotiating right now.

The types of military support the West is giving to Ukraine including US and German tanks and British promises to train Ukrainian pilots on their fighter jets acknowledge this reality and could help contribute to it, argues Chivvis. The most advanced and heavy weaponry, like the USs Abrams tanks, likely wont arrive till next spring. The trend is toward more and more military support to the Ukrainians, and they have no real reason as of now to limit their own war objectives, says Chivvis, who previously worked as a US intelligence officer in Europe. So its hard to see how it ends at this point.

And yet, the longer the war goes on, the more people will die in Ukraine and Russia, and the risks for the war to spiral out of control are real. As Pickering put it, the US risks stumbling into an endless war punctuated by nuclear use.

The war to defend Ukraine may be more coherent than the war on terrorism, but it also appears ill-defined in terms of goals and strategies. Analysts who might not agree on much else do agree that there isnt enough of a debate on what outcomes the US seeks.

The Biden administration, for its unprecedented mustering of allies through NATO, Europe, and elsewhere, has left some gaps unfilled. Deferring to Ukraine, as Bidens national security leaders have consistently done in public interviews, is not a strategy.

Less attention has been paid to how this conflict might end in a way that serves US interests in Europe and the world, according to Samuel Charap, an analyst at the RAND Corporation. And those trying to have that conversation about how to end the war, he told me, are sometimes cast as Russian sympathizers. But there is an urgency to have these difficult conversations. We know that, for example, conflicts that last more than a year are more than likely to continue to go on for 10 years, Charap told me.

I dont think that we should tolerate a war that stretches on for years, because if we do, it means that we are tolerating greater risk that the war will spread, said Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama defense official who now directs the McCain Institute think tank. If we knowingly accept a war that will go on for years, then I think we are taking on a moral hazard because Ukrainians are dying every month this war goes on.

The toll on human life is unfathomable, and the long-term effects on the country will be many. Kurt Volker, a former ambassador to NATO now at the Atlantic Council think tank, is worried about how the wartime mentality has forever changed Ukrainian institutions. Were going to have to help Ukraine get back to normal, he told me.

You have the presidential administration basically running everything. You have one centralized media operation for news for the country, which is highly censored, Volker said. These are things that cant go on in a normal society. So theyre going to have to decentralize. Theyre going to have to open new media outlets, going to have to have political pluralism in terms of political parties and competition all kinds of things that they are not currently grappling with.

The rebuilding of Ukraine will require massive investments, too. The countrys energy infrastructure will need to be rebuilt, and just keeping its economy afloat in the meantime may require up to $5 billion a month, the International Monetary Fund has estimated. After the hot conflict ends, the US commitment will likely continue. But an end to the conflict seems increasingly hard to find.

A Defense Department leader, Celeste Wallander, was recently asked at a Washington think tank event whether the Pentagon is planning for a negotiated outcome or an outright Ukrainian victory on the battlefield. It is difficult ahead of time to precisely predict how an armed conflict will end, Wallander said, though she did emphasize that it ends in Russias strategic failure, no question, and that the US will support the choices made by Ukraine as to whether it would negotiate with Russia.

But Wallander and her colleagues in the Biden administration have left open the question of how the US would extricate itself from this conflict. Without having a clear answer of how this ends or how the US will get out, they presuppose that Washington will be in this war for the long haul.

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Ukraine war: Whats the exit path for the US? - Vox