American bombs fall on Afghanistan; Bush says "time is running out"
Four weeks after September 11, the Taliban still refused to hand over Osama bin Laden. On October 7, 2001, U.S. and British warplanes struck Taliban air defenses, training camps, and troop positions across Afghanistan, while American special operations forces began linking up on the ground with the Northern Alliance. President Bush announced the strikes that evening, warning that "full warning has been given, and time is running out." It was the opening day of what became the longest war in American history.
October 7 began a twenty-year commitment to a war without fronts or surrender ceremonies. It set the template of special operators embedded with local militias and airpower in place of mass invasion, a template that guided American responses to terrorism for a generation. It also opened a conflict whose end, in the Taliban's 2021 return to Kabul, Americans are still arguing over.
QHow many Pakistani volunteers crossed the border to fight for the Taliban?
About 10,000 Pakistani volunteers streamed across the border by mid-October 2001 to reinforce Taliban ranks. They were mostly madrassa students from the frontier region, some as young as 14, joining a fight that had little to do with their own country's government, which was publicly siding with Washington even as fighters slipped over to the other side. The influx showed how porous the Afghan-Pakistan border already was before the war even began, a problem that haunted coalition forces for the next two decades as Taliban fighters used the same crossings to retreat and resupply. Pakistan's own intelligence services had long-standing ties to the Taliban, reflecting divided loyalties that would mark the war for years afterward.
QWhat combat aircraft did the Taliban have left to meet American and British bombers?
The Taliban fielded roughly 40 combat aircraft against the opening American and British air assault, a scattered fleet of aging Soviet-era jets that stood almost no chance against modern warplanes. Ground forces fared little better for mobility, leaning on civilian pickup trucks rather than armored vehicles for transport across the country. The mismatch meant the first strikes targeted air defenses specifically to clear the sky fast, since the Taliban's air power posed more of a theoretical obstacle than a real one. Within days, American and British aircraft operated over Afghanistan with little opposition from the air. The war was then decided almost entirely by ground fighting between the Taliban and Northern Alliance.
QWho was leading the Northern Alliance when American bombs started falling, and what happened to its previous commander?
The Northern Alliance went into the war having lost its longtime commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated on September 9, 2001, just two days before the September 11 attacks in the United States, making it only two days, not a longer gap. His killers posed as journalists and detonated explosives hidden in a camera during a staged interview, a plot widely attributed to al-Qaeda operatives. Massoud had fought the Taliban since 1996 and was the alliance's most recognized leader. His death left the coalition of anti-Taliban fighters without its central figure as American special forces arrived.
