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On February 2, 2007, the residents of the southern Afghan town of Musa Qala awoke to see the white banner of the Taliban flying above the town center where the black, red, and green flag of the national government had been the day before. Several hundred armed Taliban fighters had seized this district center in the north of Helmand Prov- ince and expelled the local authorities without a fight. On April 1 they hanged three “spies,” leaving their bodies in strategic locations, in the center and at the northern and southern entrances to the town, to dramatize the restoration of Taliban rule. A number of residents fled, fearing NATO air strikes; others remained in Musa Qala. As brilliant red poppy flowers bloomed across the fertile Helmand River Valley, the heart of global opium cultivation, many farmers in the dis- trict supported the change of regime. “The Taliban tell us ‘as long as we are here, no one can destroy your poppy,’” a local harvester ex- plained, adding, “The government cannot come here now, because there is another power here. It is the government of the Taliban.”1
Accompanied by a campaign of suicide bombings, kidnappings,
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and assassinations in 2006 and 2007, the fall of Musa Qala and other locales across southern, central, and eastern Afghanistan to Taliban forces—as well as increased Taliban activity in the neighboring prov- inces of Pakistan—signaled a turning point in a war nearly forgot- ten by most outsiders. On October 7, 2001, the United States had launched a campaign to destroy the Taliban in retaliation for the ter- rorist attacks of September 11. An extensive bombing operation sup- ported local anti-Taliban militias, Central Intelligence Agency oper- atives, and U.S. Special Forces in driving the Taliban from the 90 percent of the country that they ruled. By November 12, Afghan mi- litias allied with the United States had seized the capital, Kabul. A month later, the story of the Taliban came full circle when Taliban fighters abandoned their last stronghold, Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second city and the birthplace of the movement.2
By the end of the year, the Taliban presence had faded from the country. Their fighters melted back into village communities and dis- appeared into rugged mountain enclaves. Many found refuge in Pa- kistan. The foreign fighters and radicals around Osama bin Laden also vanished. The movement of Muslim clerics and madrasa stu- dents that had emerged suddenly in 1994 in the south of the country and had swept across all but a narrow strip of northern Afghanistan seemed to evaporate just as abruptly as it had appeared. With the es- tablishment of a new government, the United States and other inter- national sponsors announced the birth of a “post-Taliban” order and the restoration of security and stability to Afghanistan and the wider region. The Taliban moment in Afghan history had passed.
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