What American invasion of Afghanistan?
A front page story October 11 ("A Dogged Taliban Chief Rebounds, Vexing U.S.")
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/world/asia/11mullah.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&ref=todayspaper&adxnnlx=1255461787-oRiomL6n9Y1ZQtDozVToBg
starts thus:
"In late 2001, Mullah Muhammad Omar’s prospects seemed utterly bleak. The ill-educated, one-eyed leader of the Taliban had fled on a motorbike after his fighters were swiftly routed by the Americans invading Afghanistan."
Then one finds this in an article ("The Real Peace Prize Will Be Elusive")
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/weekinreview/11baker.html?ref=todayspaper
in the "Week in Review" by a reporter who was actually in Afghanistan when the Taliban regime fell, and for some time afterwards:
"The Americans tried to accomplish what the British and Soviets failed to do, by using a different way of warfare, one with few American troops on the ground while supporting the Northern Alliance largely from the air. There were so few American soldiers in Afghanistan that we never ran into one for the first six months we were there."
So where were all those Americans invading the country? The answer is simple. The U.S. did not in fact invade Afghanistan in any meaningful sense of the word (unlike the Soviet invasion in 1979, or indeed the American invasion of Iraq in 2003). One wonders why the invasion myth is constantly repeated. Especially when the events are only eight years old and were covered widely, in print and on television, at the time.
