This was a central aspect of the war on terror at its inception and a foreshadowing of what its implications would be. Once we accept the frame that Bush offered — war on terror — we were then locked into a struggle not just against al-Qaeda, the entity culpable for the 9/11 attacks, but a much broader struggle against an enemy that a president could redefine at will and leave in the popular imagination with something along the lines of a civilizational challenge to America for the future, one in which America itself was in the balance.
Now, let’s look, in particular, at that moment in Kandahar. The United States’s Northern Alliance allies had routed the Taliban from Kabul. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan had fallen, after about five, six years in power, and they recognized, after a last stand they tried to put on in Kandahar didn’t go the way they expected, that the end was near for them. And then they offered to Hamid Karzai, the U.S.’s appointed leader for a post-Taliban Afghanistan, that as long as Mullah Omar could live in some kind of house arrest, basically not be killed, not be put up on trial, they were prepared to entertain negotiations for what their role might be in a post-Taliban Afghanistan — basically, a political settlement at that point.
Karzai, for all his flaws that the United States would both contribute to and then criticize him for over the coming years, nevertheless knew Afghan history and recognized that unless there was
— source democracynow.org | Aug 20, 2021