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371 Felipe Santos Rodríguez Strategic communication in modern conflicts : Afganistan the two dominant families drag a confrontation that dates back to the sixteenth century. At the time of the invasion, some supported the mullah Omar, and others, the deposed king. This complex division is a barrier to NATO missions. “The infras-tructure cannot create a single nation by itself. Today, Bosnia has all the roads and schools needed, however their ethnic groups are as divided as ever “.37 The Taliban were unable to conquer all the country from the year 1996 till the year 2000. Ten or fifteen percent of the territory was not in their control. Therefore the regime had coexisted with a small civil war in the northern territories. The US was not going to have an easy task getting into a country so used to war. Before the incident of the attacks on the 11th of September, The US played two cards: one side arming the opposition and the other allowing the Pakistani intelligence services to support the Taliban. No wonder that the Bush administration would bear in mind what happened in Vietnam. In fact, three weeks after the bombing began, the press began to question the progress and expectations of the said operation. Newsweek first spoke of quagmire (predicament) fatal word that was used during the Vietnam War to describe a hopeless situation. One week later, The New York Times published an analysis of the situation in which you could read: “Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam?”38 It maybe that part of the precaution stems from this, as well as the Bush administration’s strong desire to shelve the Afghanistan situation. But, “as proved by Vietnam, the imperial power can not compete with people who have nothing to lose.”39 One of the main problems that President Bush ran into was that he had at his disposal was military resource that were too conventional for the type of war facing him. The first thing that was discarded was a response similar to the one given by Clinton, where he used as a deterrent attacks via cruise missiles When Al-Qaida attempted in 1998 against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, an order was given to launch 66 cruise missiles into the training camps of Bin Laden in Afghanistan. The missiles did not hit anything, for the terrorists had managed to flee in advance. So when Bush asked Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, what the military could do immediately, the reply was simply: “Effectively, very little.”40 This distrust of the military component that they had at their disposal came from the earliest days of the administration. In fact Rumsfeld had begun an attempt to 37  IGNATIEFF, M. El nuevo imperio americano. La reconstrucción nacional en Bosnia, Kosovo y Afganistán. Barcelona: Paidós, 2003, p. 91. 38  WOODWARD, B. Bush en guerra. Barcelona: Península, 2003, p.304. 39  IGNATIEFF, M. El nuevo imperio americano. La reconstrucción nacional en Bosnia, Kosovo y Afganistán. Barcelona: Paidós, 2003, p. 105. 40  WOODWARD, B. Bush en guerra. Barcelona: Península, 2003, p. 64.


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