Name one U.S. military conflict after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Why this is the answer

Three answers are accepted: the War on Terror (or Global War on Terror), the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. They are connected but not the same thing, so it helps to know how each began. One week after the attacks, on September 18, 2001, the Authorization for Use of Military Force became law. This joint resolution of Congress let the President use all necessary and appropriate force against the nations, organizations or persons he determined had planned, authorized, committed or aided the attacks, or had harbored them. Two days later the President addressed a joint session of Congress and named the enemy: al Qaeda, a loose network of terrorist groups whose leaders had great influence in Afghanistan and supported the Taliban regime that controlled most of the country. He said the war on terror began with al Qaeda but would not end until every terrorist group of global reach had been found, stopped and defeated. The first answer on the list, the War on Terror, uses those same words. The war in Afghanistan started on October 7, 2001. The Taliban had not met demands to close terrorist training camps and hand over al Qaeda's leaders, and U.S. forces, joined by Great Britain, began strikes against those camps and Taliban military sites. The war in Iraq came later, as a separate decision. On March 19, 2003, American and coalition forces began military operations to disarm Iraq and undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war. A useful way to keep the three straight is by order: the War on Terror is the broad campaign announced in September 2001, Afghanistan came first, in October 2001, as what the President called part of that campaign, and Iraq followed in 2003. Any one of the three is a full answer. The mistakes here come from earlier decades. The Persian Gulf War was also fought against Iraq, but it is the answer to a different question, about getting the Iraqi military out of Kuwait. Korea and Vietnam were fought to stop the spread of communism. Only the three conflicts on this list count for this question.