Afghanistan conflict unending

KABUL, Afghanistan — It seemed so easy five years ago: Anti-Taliban forces rolled into Afghanistan's capital after a monthlong American bombing campaign, and the repressive Islamist regime scattered like leaves in autumn.

With the Taliban gone, many Afghan men shaved their beards and some women cast off their burqas. But Osama bin Laden and the architects of Sept. 11 slipped away in eastern Afghanistan, and that should have been a clue to how elusive objectives can be in this fractious nation.

America turned its attention and resources to Iraq. But today the Taliban remnants have mutated into a different force — far deadlier, better organized and well-armed. With close bonds to the al-Qaida international Islamist network, the insurgents have imported new skills previously unseen in three decades of war in Afghanistan — remote-control roadside bombs and suicide bombers.

Here, where the war on terror began after the Sept. 11 attacks, a cold, hard reality has set — the battle has become a protracted counterinsurgency campaign that international officials say won't be resolved for years, even decades.

"This is not linear at all," said Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the commander of the American-led coalition in Afghanistan. New forces have entered the mix — tribal chiefs, opium traffickers and extremists experienced from the Iraqi conflict. "All this fuels on a militant ideology that has a way of resonating with the people here."

Afghans complain that American policymakers paid too much attention to capturing a few high-value targets like bin Laden, and not enough to addressing the more complex social and economic problems that made Afghanistan a welcome environment for Islamic extremists.

"I think that it was very naive to believe after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 that was the end of the Taliban," Afghan Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta said in an interview. "That was the reason why they concentrated only on the military action against the Taliban. But anti-terror is a comprehensive project."

The top United Nations diplomat in Afghanistan agrees.

"Maybe it was a bit simple to think you could just extinguish this flame by sort of pushing them out or blowing them out," said Tom Koenigs, the head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. "We were maybe too shortsighted."