<p>Compared with other NATO allies, the Netherlands reacted with caution and hesitation to the immediate geopolitical and military aftermaths of the 9/11 attacks. Uncomfortable with the Bush administration’s unilateral behaviour and choice for direct military retaliation, and unsure about a strategic situation in which the USA suddenly and unexpectedly was the recipient rather than provider of NATO Article 5 mutual support, the then Dutch Labour-Liberal government stalled for time and hoped for the best. Soon, however, the Dutch leadership could not withstand mounting US pressures to join its military counter-terrorism coalition. Without a proper post-Cold War national security strategy to begin with, and both unable and unwilling to adequately adapt to the international developments of the autumn of 2001, the country was inevitably drawn into the series of Afghanistan interventions that eventually lasted 20&#xa0;years. Empirically based on official documents never researched before, this article deciphers the hidden history of Dutch policy- and decision-making by the principals and advisers who, in the months following 9/11, were initially hesitant to respond to US and allied demands for loyalty and troops. Who then, based on military and political risk assessments, long kept prioritising other allied peacebuilding commitments closer to home over the new US-led global war on terrorism, and who finally, compromised with small and mostly symbolic military deployments to the US-managed coalition’s Afghanistan efforts, which at the time were mainly focussed on backfilling US deployments far from Afghanistan or on a limited peacekeeping role in Kabul (that the Netherlands hoped would finish soon). In the end, however, the Dutch decisions would prove to be the start, after all, of a series of participations in Operation Enduring Freedom and in the International Security Assistance Force in which troops were increasingly put in harm’s way and from which there was no going back for two decades.</p>