The Afghanistan War Removes the Taliban From Kabul Within Six Weeks, Tora Bora Fails to Capture Bin Laden and Argentina Becomes the Largest Sovereign Default in History

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 January 2002 | Reporting Period: 3 October – 2 January 2002

Quarterly Briefing

• The United States, United Kingdom and allied Afghan Northern Alliance forces launch the war in Afghanistan on October 7, bombing Taliban military infrastructure and Al-Qaeda training camps; Northern Alliance ground forces advance rapidly with coalition air support; Mazar-i-Sharif falls on November 9; Kabul falls on November 13 and Taliban forces retreat south; Kandahar, the Taliban’s headquarters city, falls on December 9; the Taliban regime that harboured Al-Qaeda has been removed from power in sixty-three days.
• US and Afghan forces conduct the battle of Tora Bora from December 12-17, targeting a mountain cave complex in eastern Afghanistan where Osama Bin Laden is believed to be located; the battle destroys significant Al-Qaeda positions and kills an estimated 200 fighters; however, Bin Laden and his senior commanders are not found; intelligence assessments indicate that he escaped across the border into Pakistan; the failure to capture or kill Bin Laden at Tora Bora will define the strategic trajectory of the war on terror for years.
• Argentina’s President Fernando de la Rúa resigns on December 20 amid street protests against austerity measures; the country cycles through three presidents in two weeks; the incoming government announces on December 23 that Argentina is suspending payments on its $132 billion sovereign debt, the largest sovereign default in history; the peso’s convertibility with the US dollar, maintained for eleven years, is abandoned in January; the IMF’s structural adjustment model, which had underpinned Argentine economic policy throughout the 1990s, faces fundamental reassessment.
• Richard Reid, a British citizen who had converted to Islam and trained in Al-Qaeda camps, is overpowered by passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami on December 22 after attempting to detonate explosives hidden in his shoe; the incident demonstrates both Al-Qaeda’s ongoing capacity for innovative attack planning and the effectiveness of passenger resistance; shoe removal for airport security screening will subsequently become universal in Western aviation systems.
• The Enron Corporation files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on December 2, the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history at that point; the company’s collapse, after years of fraudulent off-balance-sheet accounting and internal governance failures, wipes out the retirement savings of thousands of employees and triggers an investigation into accounting practices across corporate America; the Houston-based energy trading company had been celebrated as an innovative business model throughout the 1990s.
• The Caribbean absorbs the full impact of the September 11 attacks on tourism; the fourth quarter of 2001, which spans the peak US holiday booking season, produces catastrophically reduced bookings; hotel occupancies fall by 30-50 per cent in some markets; airlines cut Caribbean routes; cruise operators reduce itineraries; the economic shock is compounding existing fiscal stress from high debt servicing obligations; Jamaica and regional governments are assembling emergency support packages for the tourism sector.

Prologue: Sixty-Three Days from September 11 to Kabul

The speed of the Afghan campaign’s initial phase was remarkable. From the first airstrikes on October 7 to the fall of Kabul on November 13, the coalition had removed the Taliban from Afghanistan’s capital in five and a half weeks, using a combination of precision air power and Northern Alliance ground forces that had been in place, armed and waiting, before the campaign began. The military achievement was genuine; the political achievement of establishing a successor government sufficiently legitimate and capable to govern Afghanistan was a different matter entirely, and the Bonn Agreement signed on December 5 to establish the Afghan Interim Authority under Hamid Karzai was the beginning rather than the conclusion of that challenge.

Tora Bora’s Missed Opportunity

The battle of Tora Bora from December 12-17 represented the war on terror’s most consequential intelligence and military failure of the quarter. The decision to rely primarily on Afghan proxy forces for the ground assault — rather than inserting the US special operations forces that were available — created gaps in the encirclement that allowed Bin Laden and hundreds of Al-Qaeda fighters to escape into Pakistan’s tribal areas. The rationale for the decision involved concerns about alienating Afghan sensitivities by flooding the country with US troops; the consequence was that the man responsible for September 11 survived. The war on terror would not achieve its primary stated objective for nearly another decade.

For the Caribbean, the Afghanistan campaign’s significance was primarily in its consequences for the broader geopolitical environment. An ongoing conflict in Afghanistan meant sustained US military engagement in a region that produced the oil on which Caribbean economies depended; it meant a continuing threat environment that suppressed international travel confidence; and it meant a Bush administration whose foreign policy priorities were increasingly shaped by security imperatives that had limited direct relevance to Caribbean development needs. The diaspora communities in the US and UK that sustained Caribbean remittance flows were living through an environment of security anxiety and economic uncertainty that directly affected their capacity to send money home.

Looking Ahead

The Afghan interim government under Karzai begins 2002 with a mandate but without security forces, revenue or administrative capacity; international reconstruction commitments will take months to translate into ground-level impact. Argentina’s default is the immediate financial shock facing global capital markets; its consequences for other emerging market economies, including Caribbean states with high external debt, will unfold through the year. The Caribbean tourism sector enters 2002 facing the worst year for arrivals in decades; recovery will depend on whether the security environment settles and whether airlines restore capacity. The war on terror has no clear end point; its expansion toward Iraq is already being discussed in Washington.

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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