They didn't really pull out of Afghanistan in '02; there were never particularly many US troops there to begin with. The most complete chart I could find: nationalpriorities.org;
The original Taliban government fell over pretty easily against a combination of native warlords (the Northern Alliance), a relatively small number of US special forces, and US air power. But the trouble was pretty much the same as happened in Iraq; the Taliban was never much of a conventional force, but it still takes a lot of boots on the ground to actually keep things under control. I guess the native warlords didn't exactly have much sway outside of their home areas.
Oops, I found a better graphic, nytimes.com
At the time of the fall of Kabul, the US had something like 1500 troops in country, I think essentially all special forces. A clip from wikepedia:
By the end of November, Kandahar, the Taliban's birthplace, was its last remaining stronghold, and was coming under increasing pressure. Nearly 3,000 tribal fighters, led by Hamid Karzai, a loyalist of the former Afghan king, and Gul Agha Sherzai, the governor of Kandahar before the Taliban seized power, put pressure on Taliban forces from the east and cut off the northern Taliban supply lines to Kandahar. The threat of the Northern Alliance loomed in the north and northeast.
Meanwhile, the first significant U.S. combat troops had arrived. Nearly 1,000 Marines, ferried in by CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters and C-130s, set up a Forward Operating Base known as Camp Rhino in the desert south of Kandahar on November 25. This was the coalition's first strategic foothold in Afghanistan, and was the stepping stone to establishing other operating bases. The first significant combat involving U.S. ground forces occurred a day after Rhino was captured when 15 armored vehicles approached the base and were attacked by helicopter gunships, destroying many of them. Meanwhile, the airstrikes continued to pound Taliban positions inside the city, where Mullah Omar was holed up. Omar, the Taliban leader, remained defiant despite the fact that his movement only controlled 4 out of the 30 Afghan provinces by the end of November and called on his forces to fight to the death. en.wikipedia.org
Those thousand marines seemed to bring the US total up to 2500. It was quite an amazing operation , but it didn't exactly leave the country under anybody's control. It lead to some extensive amplification of hubris in Washington, though. |
