Talk:Operation Enduring Freedom

From Academic Kids

The phrase enduring is ambiguous, and it is somewhat surprising that this ambiguity was not raised in these discussions.

In the usual intended sense it obviously referred to freedom that would last. Others, could view it as meaning that freedom imposed by American weaponry is something to be endured. --Eclecticology, Thursday, May 30, 2002

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"the campaign is regarded as limited to punishing the Taliban and eliminating their potential to attack the US again": this makes it sound like the Taliban have attacked the US before. Is that so? If not, perhaps it should be rephrased.--branko

The view of the US, i.e., the Bush administration, is that the Taliban did attack the US before; they regard the 9/11 attacks as being done by (or at the behest of) the Taliaban.

No, they don't. They believe the were carried about by Al-Qaida, at the beshest of bin Laden with the support of the Taliban -- User:GWO

Oh, my mistake. Then the US is punished the Taliban for supporting Al-Qaida. This is getting tricky. Feel free to revert my edits, if I messed up. --Ed Poor 09:27 Aug 12, 2002 (PDT)

Naturally, the 'pedia can neither support nor oppose this position. So the rephrasing should clarify that the "before" and "again" represent the US position. As in The US believes that the Taliban conducted or supported the 9/11 attacks, and the campaign is intended both as to punish the Taliban for 9/11 and to prevent them from attacking the US again. (If needed, we might add something like the following Mustapha Buwalla, a spokesman for the Blah Blah Coalition, denies that the Taliban had anything to do with 9/11 and thus regards the US campaign as totally unwarranted, labeling it an "act of naked imperialist aggression.") --Ed Poor 09:18 Aug 12, 2002 (PDT)

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I think this page should redirect to U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which gives a much more thorough treatment to the same subject. DanKeshet

I disagree, Dan. This page serves as a sort of disambiguation page. Furthermore, the "Operation" and the "invasion" are not identical.

• Here is one difference: OEF was a campaign to stop and/or punish the Taliban. The invasion of Afghanistan was a tactic used in that campaign.
• Another difference is that the invasion itself has been the subject of speculation and commentary. Is it for nation-building? Is it a violation of sovereignty? Does it constitute an "attack on" Afghanistan? Meanwhile, OEF (the military campaign) has a focused objective.

Thus, the topics are sufficiently distinct to stand alone. Please don't delete this article, unless (A) you merge everything it says into the other article and (B) others get a chance to see that your merge really is better. --Ed Poor

This is wrong. Operation Enduring Freedom was the name for the military campaign, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The name for the political framework under which the campaign was taken is the War on Terrorism. I will attempt to merge any content from here into U.S. invasion of Afghanistan before redirecting. DanKeshet

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Last call for further objections before I redirect this page tomorrow. Every useful piece of information in this article is now covered in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan article. DanKeshet

If you say all the content is merged and in, I trust you. Just leave this talk page, okay? --Ed Poor 15:09 Nov 4, 2002 (UTC)

resurgency

I realize that there's a link on the article that goes to a page that addresses this fact, but I still think that it should be mentioned within this article under the heading "Effectiveness of U.S. invasion of Afghanistan" that there has been a resurgency of Taliban forces in Southern Afghanistan, and that the Taliban in addition to other warlords retain a great amount of sovereignty outide the area around Kabul.