The United States and its NATO allies responded 10 years ago this week to the 9/11 attacks with a military campaign to oust Al-Qaeda's Taliban hosts. The conflict went on to become the longest war in U.S. history as international and Afghan forces battled a fierce insurgency, with casualties and frustrations mounting within the war-weary Afghan public and the international community.
10 Years Of Afghan War
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A U.S. flag is raised outside the World Trade Center construction site in New York to mark 10 years since the 9/11 attacks, when Al-Qaeda operatives used hijacked passenger planes to kill nearly 3,000 people.
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Northern Alliance tanks move toward the city of Amam Sahip in mid-November 2001.
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Afghan opposition Northern Alliance soldiers run and jump as they return from a frontline position after battle near the town of Charatoy in the days after the U.S.-led response to 9/11 began in Afghanistan.
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Anti-Taliban Afghan fighters watch explosions in December 2001 from U.S. bombings in the rugged Tora Bora mountains, where reports suggested Osama bin Laden might have fled.
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Non-Afghan Taliban read the Koran in a military jail in Kabul in November 2001.
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A girl reads from the board in a home-based school in Kabul in December 2001. The Taliban had enforced a prohibition on education for women.
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Afghan traffic police stand near Kabul's destroyed King's Palace in August 2005, one month before historic parliamentary and provincial elections created the country's first legislature based on the ballot.
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Former monarch Mohammad Zahir Shah (left) speaks with the man chosen by the international community in late 2001 to lead the Afghan Interim Authority after the Taliban was ousted, Hamid Karzai. Karzai has presided continuously ever since.
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A U.S. soldier takes a break during a night mission in the Pesh Valley of Kunar Province in 2009.
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A villager smiles while welcoming a UN helicopter landing to collect ballot boxes in a remote eastern village on October 10, 2004, the day after the first direct presidential election in Afghan history.
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Ten-year-old Afghan boy Ismaeel works at a brick factory on the outskirts of Kabul in 2002, when Afghan and international officials were facing the brutal reality of rebuilding a country already devastated by decades of war.
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A U.S. marine walks on a road at Forward Operating Base Delaram in Helmand Province in 2011.
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A schoolgirl in a Kapisa hospital after she was poisoned at an area school in May 2009. Taliban fighters have maintained their violent opposition to education for women, frequently targeting schools with bombings or poisonings.
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A man walks in November 2005 near a cavernous space left empty when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001.
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Preflight checks on an unmanned Predator U.S. spy plane before takeoff from an undisclosed location. Unmanned drones have played a major role in the U.S. effort to attack Al-Qaeda and other militant targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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Afghan ceremonies marking the fifth anniversary of the death of Ahmad Shah Masud, a mujahedin commander known as the "Lion of Panjshir," in September 2006.
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Election workers audit and recount ballots at the Independent Elections Commission (IEC) warehouse in Kabul in October 2009.
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Afghan boys cry for a missing father, feared among the victims of a bomb attack on Kabul by militants in September 2007.
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Afghan policemen walk beside a burning pile of opium products during an official ceremony in Kabul in 2007.
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A U.S. marine guards a detainee at a U.S. Marine base in Marjah, in Helmand Province, in 2010.
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A Hazara girl covers her face as she holds a child in a cave in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in December 2011.
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An Afghan boy walks by a pile of Russian-made helmets in the Panjshir Valley in August 2005.
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Locals escape the scene of a deadly suicide attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul in July 2008.
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A dust-covered Afghan National Army soldier with a flower tucked behind his ear rides on the back of a vehicle during a patrol near the Taliban stronghold of Panjwaii town, in Kandahar Province, in 2007.
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A woman votes at a polling station in Herat in the 2010 parliamentary elections, the fourth effort at democratic polls since the UN-backed Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was founded after the Taliban ouster.
