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However, after a few years of NATO occupation Afghanistan became the world's largest producer and exporter of opium and so last autumn the Alliance announced that it was planning to conduct armed raids against opium and "drug traffickers," however the West decided to define the second.
The ongoing and endless war in Afghanistan - and now Pakistan - has metamorphosed from a hunt for bin Laden, to a fight against Taliban to a drug war modeled after the US's murderous Plan Colombia initiated in 1999. There are reports that 300 Colombian troops are slated for deployment to Afghanistan to replicate that model.
Notwithstanding recent talk by US President Barrack Obama about an Afghan exit strategy, it's not apparent that Washington and its allies ever intend to leave the country and the broader South-Asia/Central Asia/Caspian Sea Basin/South Caucasus circumference whose center Afghanistan is.
Two weeks ago the Russia Novosti website featured this observation: "Central Asian states think the U.S. started the Afghan war to change the regional regimes into local analogues of Georgia's Saakashvili and Ukraine's Yushchenko, and that it began with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Iran, China and Russia think the war could be Washington's attempt to reduce their influence in Central Asia to zero."
Less than four months before the invasion of Afghanistan China, Russia and four of the five former Soviet Central Asia republics - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - founded the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a mutual security grouping that would later include India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan as observers.
It's purpose is to provide regional security and to address the issues of trans-border crime, including narcotics smuggling, armed extremism and separatism.
Since its inception it has also increasingly focused on joint development projects in the spheres of energy, transportation, trade and infrastructure.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Central Asia was seen by the SCO's founding members and since by its observers as a mechanism for fostering mutually beneficial relations among the nations of Central Asia and Russia, China, Iran, India and even Turkey eventually.
Afghanistan has been hurled into interminable turmoil, with hundreds of thousands of its citizens displaced; almost daily bombing runs, drone missile attacks, middle-of-the-night commando raids, indiscriminate shooting of civilians at checkpoints; mass-scale drought and famine; an explosion of opium cultivation and trafficking; expansion of that destabilization by setting Pakistan aflame with the potential for its fragmentation and dismemberment and heightened tensions with its - fellow nuclear - neighbor India.
This is the current, grave situation seven and a half years after the invasion of Afghanistan.
With the deployment of another 30,000 US troops and thousands more from NATO's ranks (recently Italy, Poland, Georgia, Azerbaijan and other nations have announced increases) Western troop strength will soon approach 100,000.
This is pouring fuel on fire. Taliban has become as amorphous a term as al-Qaeda has been; anyone in Afghanistan, even in the non-Pushtun North and West of the nation, who takes issue with Western warplanes and combat troops dealing out death and destruction in their nation and their villages is now a Talib. An enemy.
The more US and NATO troops that arrive in Afghanistan, the more resentment, resistance and violence will ensue. Inevitably.
The US and NATO have arrogantly spurned offers by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the post-Soviet Collective Security Treaty Organization to assist in bringing a regional - and non-military - resolution of the myriad crises afflicting Afghanistan, its long-suffering people and the region.
NATO is not a nation-building, peacekeeping or humanitarian outfit - it is an aggressive military bloc. When it and its individual member states' military forces leave South and Central Asia then healing, reconstruction and lasting peace can begin.
