> It’s a fairly lengthy operation to succinctly cite But also see other user’s post below. In short, Afghanistan and Al Qaeda were on the map for a very long

> It’s a fairly lengthy operation to succinctly cite But also see other user’s post below. In short, Afghanistan and Al Qaeda were on the map for a very long time, but no one listened. By the time 9/11 occurred, AQ was a global, well coordinated organization with a single underfunded agency (CIA) tracking it. The agency was largely forbidden from accessing the only spot Al Qaeda really aggregated: Afghanistan. If you can orient to a pre-Internet time, it makes sense how much (realized) risk this black box caused - embassy and US navy ship bombings, and 9/11. The United Front is another term for the Northern Alliance, a ~tribal group in northern AFG. It was the CIA’s main access and information flow into AFG until 9/12. The state dept and official policy largely forbade interacting with them though. The leader of the UF who the CIA linked with starting back in the late 90s, guy named Massood, was assassinated by the Taliban/AQ on like 9/10 iirc (so days before 9/11). This all goes to say that the invasion of AFG was tremendously important, but staying there once AQ was gone maybe was not. There are fairly tragic records of July and early Sept 2001 briefings from the CIA to the President on the imminent threat actual. One way to start reading about this history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cofer_Black https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cofer_Black