The attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11) were the most catastrophic attacks on the U.S. homeland since Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. They were particularly devastating because they were perpetrated by a small number of lightly-armed religious extremists, and thus brought home to the United States the lethality of ideologically-motivated asymmetric warfare in the 21st century. The attacks were recognized as acts of war by both the George W. Bush administration and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history. The President declared the United States would respond to the attacks accordingly, using all of its relevant resources. While the administration recognized the enemy facing the United States and the civilized world was the combination of a global network of Islamic extremist groups (al Qaeda was but one of the groups) and their state and nonstate sponsors, it focused first on Afghanistan. Shortly after 9/11, President Bush articulated his broad foreign policy goals in Afghanistan and laid out a strategy that included the main instruments of U.S. national power: diplomatic, economic, and military. He also recognized the United States could not achieve its objectives unilaterally; he welcomed and strongly supported cooperation with the United Nations (UN) and the international community. Throughout the entire Bush administration, from 2001 to 2008, the U.S.-led effort in Afghanistan was multilateral and multinational. The overarching U.S. goals for Afghanistan, which remained unchanged throughout the Bush administration, and which were maintained by the Barack Obama administration, were to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its allies, stop their use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and engage in reconstruction to help the emergence of a representative, democratic government so that Afghanistan could never again become a sanctuary for terrorist groups. The achievement of the overarching goals required a strategy of mutually reinforcing political, economic, and military efforts. The Bush administration's main political objectives in Afghanistan were to encourage the establishment of stable, representative political institutions and the rule of law. Its main economic objectives were to encourage basic human development, critical reconstruction, and the establishment of stable economic institutions and a market-based economy. Its main military objective was to provide security, so that political and economic development could proceed. The administration repeatedly emphasized that security, economic development, stable governance, the rule of law, and human rights were all interconnected, and that continued progress in all areas were necessary to ensure Afghanistan did not again become a sanctuary for transnational terrorist movements. While the overall U.S. objectives remained constant, the strategies to achieve them evolved over time as progress was made, or to account for the sheer difficulty of bringing into the 21st century a country as destroyed and undeveloped as Afghanistan. While the strategies of the United States and its partners in the international community were never adequately synchronized or coordinated, their efforts were unprecedented in Afghanistan. By 2008, more than 40 countries and hundreds of governmental and nongovernmental organizations were engaged in political, economic, and military efforts. Despite legitimate criticisms of shortcomings and failures, concrete progress was made in the country between 2001 and 2008. In a short period of time, Afghanistan, with U.S. and international assistance, created the foundations for a representative democracy and market-based economy and it identified clear future goals in various international agreements.