Michael J. Totten 5 November 2012
In March of 2001, the Taliban used anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank missiles, artillery cannons, and dynamite to obliterate enormous ancient Buddha statues carved into the cliffsides at Bamiyan. The statues were monuments to heresy, the Taliban said, and therefore must be destroyed. I’ll never forget how a friend of mine in Oregon reacted. “We have to invade,” he said. I thought he was nuts. Invade a country in the ass-end of nowhere over cultural vandalism? “If they’ll destroy harmless statues,” he said, “they’ll destroy anything and anyone. So they’re a threat to everything and everyone. Just wait. You’ll see.” He’s not a foreign policy professional nor a military historian. He’s just a concerned American citizen who had a very bad feeling about Afghanistan’s tyrannical overlords. Six months later, the worst attack against the United States in American history came out of Afghanistan. The longest war in American history followed.
Now Mali, a West African country that straddles the Sahara and the transitionary Sahel region, is shaping up to be the next Afghanistan. Earlier this year, shortly after a military coup toppled the feckless civilian government in Bamako, an Al Qaeda-affiliated organization called Ansar al-Dine seized power in Timbuktu and lopped off the northern part of the country.
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