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→Afghanistan
===Afghanistan===
===Afghanistan===
In immediate response to the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded [[Afghanistan]] to overthrow the [[Taliban]] and deny [[al-Qaeda]] a base of operations.
In immediate response to the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded [[Afghanistan]] to overthrow the [[Taliban]] and deny [[al-Qaeda]] a base of operations.
====Nation building====
Three weeks after the 9/11 attacks, on October 3, 2001, Sen. [[Joseph Biden]] of Delaware proposed on the Senate floor a billion dollars in aid to a yet-to-be-formed Afghan interim government. The amount was almost twice as much as U.N. General Secretary [[Kofi Annan]] proposed,<ref>Sen. Biden: "U.N. Secretary Kofi Annan has issued an appeal for $584 million to meet the needs of the Afghan refugees and displaced people, within Afghanistan and in neighboring countries. This is the amount deemed necessary to stave off disaster for the winter, which will start in Afghanistan in just a few weeks. We must back up our rhetoric with action, with something big and bold and meaningful. We can offer to foot the entire bill for keeping the Afghan people safely fed, clothed, and sheltered this winter, and that should be the beginning....We can kick the effort off in a way that would silence our critics in the rest of the world: a check for $1 billion, and a promise for more to come as long as the rest of the world joins us. This initial amount would be more than enough to meet all the refugees’ short-term needs, and would be a credible downpayment for the long-term effort. Eventually the world community will have to pony up more billions, but there is no avoiding that now, not if we expect our words ever to carry any weight.<br>If anyone thinks this amount of money is too high, let me note one stark, simple and very sad statistic. The damage inflicted by the September 11 attack in economic terms alone was a minimum of several hundred billion dollars and a maximum of over $1 trillion. The cost in human life, of course, as the Presiding Officer knows, is far beyond any calculation." [https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CRECB-2001-pt13/pdf/CRECB-2001-pt13-issue-2001-10-03.pdf CONGRESSIONAL RECORD—SENATE—Wednesday, October 3, 2001], Pg. 18464.</ref> and more than triple what the Bush administration asked for.<ref>[https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/biden-iraq-invasion-america-afghanistan/618640/ The Original Sin of the War in Afghanistan], By Jonah Blank, ''The Atlantic'', APRIL 20, 2021.</ref> Sen. Biden, who spoke for the Democrats in Congress, wanted more than just removal of the Taliban and degrading al Qaeda. Biden wanted [[nation building]]. Biden wanted to flood the new government with cash, which ultimately corrupted the new Karzai regime, and created an anti-[[Western]], anti-corruption, pro-Taliban resurgence and backlash.
[[File:Biden CFR October 22 2001.PNG|right|350px|thumb|Sen. Joe Biden advocating for boots on the ground and nation building at the Council on Foreign Relations, October 22, 2001.]]
On October 22, 2001, Sen. Biden, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, gave a speech at the [[Council on Foreign Relations]] insisting that U.S. goals—rooting out al-Qaeda and helping establish a friendly successor government to the Taliban—would require U.S. boots on the ground far beyond the small number of Special Forces that the [[Pentagon]] had recommended. Biden said, "There is no way that you can, in fact, go after and root out al Qaeda and or Bin Ladin without folks on the ground, in caves, risking and losing their lives. And I believe that the tolerance for that in the Islamic world is significant, exponentially higher, than it is for us bombing."<ref>Sen. Biden: "I think the American public and the Islamic world is fully prepared for us to take as long as we need to take. If it is action that is a mano-a-mano. If it's us on the ground going against other forces on the ground. The part that I think flies in the face of, and plays into every stereotypical criticism of us, is where this high tech bully that thinks from the air we can do whatever you want to do. And it builds the case, for those who want to make the case against us, that all we're doing is indiscriminately bombing innocents. Which is not the truth. Some innocents are indiscriminately bombed. But that is not the truth. I think the American public is prepared for a long siege. I think the American public has prepared for American losses. I think the American public is prepared, and the president must continue to remind them to be prepared, for American body bags coming home. There is no way that you can, in fact, go after and root out al Qaeda and or Bin Ladin without folks on the ground, in caves, risking and losing their lives. And I believe that the tolerance for that in the Islamic world is significant, exponentially higher, than it is for us bombing. That's the generic point I wish to make. I am not qualified enough to tell you. Although I can tell you what the military guys have said to me. This is not 1948. This is 2001. I'm not at all sure they're correct." [https://www.c-span.org/video/?166841-1/us-response-terrorist-attacks @59:43]</ref> Under pressure from U.S. military and anti-Taliban forces however, the Taliban disintegrated rapidly, and [[Kabul]] fell on November 13, 2001.
Hamid Karzai formed an interim government on 22 December 2001 until elections could be held after the removal of Taliban rule by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) forces. On January 10, 2002 Biden arrived in Afghanistan on a four-day fact-finding visit and at Bagram Airforce Base. The [[Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility]] had been prepared to receive jihadis. Bagram was a major collection point for preliminary interrogation. Sen. Biden said, "These are some real hard, hard, hard cases. But unless we gather the list of leaders which we -- I have in my pocket here...the possibility of them being able to do [[guerrilla]] kind of attacks on military here are real."<ref>http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0201/13/se.01.html</ref>
In 2002 and 2003, when Afghan tribal councils gathered to write a new constitution, the U.S. government gave “nice packages” to delegates who supported Washington’s preferred stance. “The perception that was started in that period: If you were going to vote for a position that Washington favored, you’d be stupid to not get a package for doing it,” according to a U.S. official interviewed by the ''[[Washington Post]]'' who served in Kabul at the time.<ref>https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-corruption-government/</ref>
According to ''[[The New York Times]]'', beginning in December 2002 throughout Karzai's terms of office, Karzai's office was funded with "tens of millions of dollars" of black cash from the [[CIA]] in order to buy influence within the Afghan government. The''NYT'' stated that "the cash that does not appear to be subject to the oversight and restrictions." An unnamed American official was quoted by ''The New York Times'' as stating that "The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States."<ref name="nytimes1">{{cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/world/asia/cia-delivers-cash-to-afghan-leaders-office.html|title=With Bags of Cash, C.I.A. Seeks Influence in Afghanistan|author=Matthew Rosenberg|newspaper=The New York Times|date=28 April 2013|access-date=29 April 2013|archive-date=28 April 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130428232309/http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/world/asia/cia-delivers-cash-to-afghan-leaders-office.html|url-status=live}}</ref>
===Iraq War===
===Iraq War===