Looking back on the strategies that the United States, the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) deployed in Afghanistan whose failure led to the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul on August 15, I am haunted in particular by the events of two separate months, occurring 18 years apart.
The first was March 2003. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, with the nom de guerre Mokhtar, was the main architect of the 9/11 conspiracy. A Pakistani from Balochistan, he was an asset of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) who worked for Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, leader of one of the seven Afghan mujahideen parties in late 1985, and arranged for Osama Bin Laden to visit one of his wives in Karachi in 2002 or early 2003.
