Almost 25 years ago, just days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush addressed the nation, making the case for war against al-Qaeda, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, was based in Afghanistan. “I sensed that something like this was not going to go unpunished,” Afghan American New Yorker and women’s rights activist Masuda Sultan told Democracy Now! at the time. Within a few weeks, the U.S. invasion began. Sultan would lose 19 members of her family when the U.S. military bombed their village outside of Kandahar. We revisit our coverage of the initial U.S. invasion, including our first interviews with Sultan in 2002, and speak to Sultan again today. She reflects on her experience, including working with Rita Lasar, the sister of a 9/11 victim, to advocate for acknowledgment and compensation for the families of Afghan civilians killed by the U.S. military.
The United States war in Afghanistan lasted for nearly 20 years, the longest-ever active conflict in U.S. history. Now as the Taliban government — overthrown by the U.S. in 2001 and later reestablished following the end of U.S. military occupation in 2021 — tightens its patriarchal restrictions on women in Afghanistan, Sultan warns international actors not to “repeat the [mistakes of the] 1990s, of turning our backs on the country. We need to engage with the Afghan people, support Afghan women and support civil society.”
