war in afghanistan essay

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Afghanistan War

By: History.com Editors

Published: August 20, 2021

The United States launched the war in Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The conflict lasted two decades and spanned four U.S. presidencies, becoming the longest war in American history.

By August 2021, the war began to come to a close with the Taliban regaining power two weeks before the United States was set to withdraw all troops from the region. Overall, the conflict resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and a $2 trillion price tag . Here's a look at key events from the conflict.

War on Terror Begins

Investigators determined the 9/11 attacks—in which terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes, crashing two into the World Trade Center towers in New York City , one at the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., and one in a Pennsylvania field —were orchestrated by terrorists working from Afghanistan, which was under the control of the Taliban, an extremist Islamic movement. Leading the plot that killed more than 2,700 people was Osama bin Laden , leader of the Islamic militant group al Qaeda . It was believed the Taliban, which seized power in the country in 1996 following an occupation by the Soviet Union , was harboring bin Laden, a Saudi, in Afghanistan.

In an address on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush demanded the Taliban deliver bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders to the United States, or "share in their fate." They refused.

On October 7, 2001, U.S. and British forces launched Operation Enduring Freedom , an airstrike campaign against al Qaeda and Taliban targets including Kandahar, Kabul and Jalalabad that lasted five days. Ground forces followed, and with the help of Northern Alliance forces, the United States quickly overtook Taliban strongholds, including the capital city of Kabul, by mid-November. On December 6, Kandahar fell, signaling the official end of Taliban rule in Afghanistan and causing al Qaeda, and bin Laden, to flee.

Shift to Reconstruction

During a speech on April 17, 2002, Bush called for a Marshall Plan to aid in Afghanistan’s reconstruction, with Congress appropriating more than $38 billion for humanitarian efforts and to train Afghan security forces. In June, Hamid Karzai, head of the Popalzai Durrani tribe, was chosen to lead the transitional government.

While approximately 8,000 American troops remained in Afghanistan as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) overseen by NATO, the U.S. military focus turned to Iraq in 2003, the same year U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared "major combat" operations had come to an end in Afghanistan.

A new constitution was soon enacted and Afghanistan held its first democratic elections since the onset of the war on October 9, 2004, with Karzai, who went on to serve two five-year terms, winning the vote for president. The ISAF’s focus shifted to peacekeeping and reconstruction, but with the United States fighting a war in Iraq, the Taliban regrouped and attacks escalated.

Troop Surge Under Obama

In a written statement released February 17, 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama pledged to send an extra 17,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan by summer to join 36,000 American and 32,000 NATO forces already deployed there. "This increase is necessary to stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires," he stated . American troops reached a peak of approximately 110,000 soldiers in Afghanistan in 2011.

In November 2010, NATO countries agreed to a transition of power to local Afghan security forces by the end of 2014, and, on May 2, 2011, following 10-year manhunt, U.S. Navy SEALs located and killed bin Laden in Pakistan.

Following bin Laden's death, a decade into the war and facing calls from both lawmakers and the public to end the war, Obama released a plan to withdraw 33,000 U.S. troops by summer 2012, and all troops by 2014. NATO transitioned control to Afghan forces in June 2013, and Obama announced a new timeline for troop withdrawal in 2014, which included 9,800 U.S. soldiers remaining in Afghanistan to continue training local forces.

Trump: 'We Will Fight to Win'

In 2015, the Taliban continued to increase its attacks, bombing the parliament building and airport in Kabul and carrying out multiple suicide bombings.

In his first few months of office, President Donald Trump authorized the Pentagon to make combat decisions in Afghanistan, and, on April 13, 2017, the United States dropped its most powerful non-nuclear bomb, called the " mother of all bombs ," on a remote ISIS cave complex.

In August 2017, Trump delivered a speech to American troops vowing " we will fight to win " in Afghanistan. "America's enemies must never know our plans, or believe they can wait us out," he said. "I will not say when we are going to attack, but attack we will."

The Taliban continued to escalate its terrorist attacks, and the United States entered peace talks with the group in February 2019. A deal was reached that included the U.S. and NATO allies pledging a total withdrawal within 14 months if the Taliban vowed to not harbor terrorist groups. But by September, Trump called off the talks after a Taliban attack that left a U.S. soldier and 11 others dead. “If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks, and would even kill 12 innocent people, then they probably don’t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway,” Trump tweeted .

Still, the United States and Taliban signed a peace agreement on February 29, 2020, although Taliban attacks against Afghan forces continued, as did American airstrikes. In September 2020, members of the Afghan government met with the Taliban to resume peace talks and in November Trump announced that he planned to reduce U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 2,500 by January 15, 2021.

Withdrawal of US Troops

The fourth president in power during the war, President Joe Biden , in April 2021, set the symbolic deadline of September 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as the date of full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, with the final withdrawal effort beginning in May.

Facing little resistance, in just 10 days, from August 6-15, 2021, the Taliban swiftly overtook provincial capitals, Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif and, finally, Kabul. As the Afghan government collapsed, President Ashraf Ghani fled to the UAE , the U.S. embassy was evacuated and thousands of citizens rushed to the airport in Kabul to leave the country.

By August 14, Biden had temporarily deployed about 6,000 U.S. troops to assist in evacuation efforts. Facing scrutiny for the Taliban's swift return to power, Biden stated , “I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth.”

During the war in Afghanistan, more than 3,500 allied soldiers were killed, including 2,448 American service members, with 20,000-plus Americans injured. Brown University research shows approximately 69,000 Afghan security forces were killed, along with 51,000 civilians and 51,000 militants. According to the United Nations, some 5 million Afghanis have been displaced by the war since 2012, making Afghanistan the world's third-largest displaced population .

The U.S. War in Afghanistan , Council on Foreign Relations

Costs of the Afghanistan war, in lives and dollars , Associated Press

Who Are the Taliban, and What Do They Want? , The New York Times

Operation Enduring Freedom Fast Facts , CNN

Afghanistan: Why is there a war? , BBC News

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Afghanistan 20/20: The 20-Year War in 20 Documents

Primary sources contradict Pentagon optimism over decades

Pakistan sanctuaries, Afghan corruption enabled Taliban resurgence

Bush nation-building, Obama surge, Trump deal all failed

Washington, D.C., August 19, 2021 –  The U.S. government under four presidents misled the American people for nearly two decades about progress in Afghanistan, while hiding the inconvenient facts about ongoing failures inside confidential channels, according to declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive.   The documents include highest-level “snowflake” memos written by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during the George W. Bush administration, critical cables written by U.S. ambassadors back to Washington under both Bush and Barack Obama, the deeply flawed Pentagon strategy document behind Obama’s “surge” in 2009, and multiple “lessons learned” findings by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) – lessons that were never learned.

Estimates of Taliban controlled districts in Afghanistan as of mid-July 2021 ranged as high as more than half, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Quarterly Report, July 31, 2021, p. 55.  The number had increased from 73 in April to 221 in July, a harbinger of the August takeover in Kabul.

The recent SIGAR report to Congress, from July 31, 2021, just as multiple provincial centers were falling to the Taliban, quotes repeated assurances from top U.S. generals (David Petraeus in 2011, John Campbell in 2015, John Nicholson in 2017, and Pentagon press secretary John Kirby in 2021) about the “increasingly capable” Afghan security forces.  The SIGAR ends that section with the warning: “More than $88 billion has been appropriated to support Afghanistan’s security sector.  The question of whether that money was well spent will ultimately be answered by the outcome of the fighting on the ground, perhaps the purest M&E [monitoring and evaluation] exercise.”  Results are now in with the total collapse of the Afghan government and a looming humanitarian crisis.   The documents detail ongoing problems that bedeviled the American war in Afghanistan from the beginning:  lack of “visibility into who the bad guys are;” Pakistan’s double game of taking U.S. aid while providing a sanctuary to the Taliban; “mission creep” as a counterterror effort against al-Qaeda morphed into a nation-building war against the Taliban; Washington’s attention deficit disorder as the Bush administration pivoted to invading and occupying Iraq; endemic corruption driven in large part by American billions and secret intelligence payments to warlords; fake statistics and gassy metrics not only by the military but also the State Department, US AID, and their many contractors; the mismatch between Afghan realities and American designs for a new centralized government and modernized army; and more.   

Read the Documents

Digital National Security Archive, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit

This is the foundational document for the first phase of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, approved by the National Security Council on October 16, 2001 (just five weeks after the 9/11 attacks). This copy carries Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s personal handwritten edits, with an October 30 cover note to his top policy aide Douglas Feith about crafting a new updated version, emphasizing that "The U.S. should not commit to any post-Taliban military involvement since the U.S. will be heavily engaged in the anti-terrorism effort worldwide." The follow-on peacekeeping force in Afghanistan “could be UN-based or an ad hoc collection of volunteer states … but not the U.S.” Rumsfeld adds the word “military” as in “not the U.S. military.” The strategy emphasizes the destruction of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and is careful not to commit the U.S. to extensive rebuilding activities in post-Taliban Afghanistan. "The USG [U.S. Government] should not agonize over post-Taliban arrangements to the point that it delays success over Al Qaida and the Taliban.” Operationally, the U.S. will "use any and all Afghan tribes and factions to eliminate Al-Qaida and Taliban personnel," while inserting "CIA teams and special forces in country operational detachments (A teams) by any means, both in the North and the South." Diplomacy is important "bilaterally, particularly with Pakistan, but also with Iran and Russia," however "engaging UN diplomacy… beyond intent and general outline could interfere with U.S. military operations and inhibit coalition freedom of action." U.S. bombing began in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, the special forces teams arrived October 19, and in the second week of November, in a stunning cascade of Taliban surrenders, all major cities except Kandahar fell to the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance. Taliban leaders took refuge mostly in Pakistan but also around Kandahar, Taliban soldiers melted into the population, and the sequence provided almost a mirror image of the rapid August 2021 implosion of the Afghan government and security forces.

Exhilarated by swift victory over the Taliban in late 2001, the Bush administration quickly switched its attention to Iraq, but by March 2002 Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was worried again about Afghanistan, writing a snowflake to top aides about setting up a weekly meeting because the situation was “drifting.” Later the same day, Rumsfeld would do a long interview with MSNBC, never mentioning his worries about drift, but rather arguing there was no point in negotiating with Taliban remnants – “the only thing you can do is to bomb them and try to kill them. And that’s what we did, and it worked. They’re gone. And the Afghan people are a lot better off.”

On April 17, 2002, President George W. Bush announced new objectives for Afghanistan in a speech at the Virginia Military Institute, including a stable government, a new army, and a new education system for boys and girls. In effect, Bush’s speech revoked the previous Rumsfeld insistence about not committing “to any post-Taliban military involvement.” That same day when the stated U.S. goals moved to nation building, Rumsfeld’s concerns about no clear exit strategy from Afghanistan crystallized in a short snowflake addressed to his top policy aide Douglas Feith and copied to his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and to the chair and vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs. “I know I’m a bit impatient,” he writes, but “We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave.” “Help!”

This Rumsfeld memo to his policy aide, Douglas Feith, on June 25, 2002 captures how naïve top American officials were about Pakistani motivations, and how throwing money at any problem came to be the core U.S. modus operandi around Afghanistan. Rumsfeld asks, “If we are going to get the Paks to really fight the war on terror where it is, which is in their country, don’t you think we ought to get a chunk of money, so that we can ease Musharraf’s transition from where he is to where we need him.” Rumsfeld does not see how Pakistan and its intelligence service were playing both sides in Afghanistan, and the net for Pakistani leader Musharraf was some $10 billion in U.S. aid over the following six years.

Obtained through FOIA by the National Security Archive

This 14-page email written between August 11 and August 15, 2002, by a Green Beret member of a commando team hunting “high-value” targets circulated at the highest levels of the Pentagon, not least because of its humor and its candor about actual conditions in Afghanistan, and the author’s previous position as a deputy assistant secretary of defense before his Reserve unit mobilized. Roger Pardo-Maurer opened with his “Greetings from scenic Kandahar” which he went on to describe as “Formerly known as ‘Home of the Taliban.’ Now known as ‘Miserable Rat-Fuck Shithole.” “Kandahar is like sitting in a sauna and having a bag of cement shaken over your head.” To those who call it dry heat, Pardo-Maurer, a member of Yale’s class of 1984, rejoins, “you don’t stay dry for long when you are the Lobster Thermidor inside a carapace of about 50 lbs. of Kevlar and ceramic plate armor, with a sweltering chamber pot on your head.” “If there is a landscape less welcoming to humans anywhere on earth, apart from the Sahara, the Poles, and the cauldrons of Kilauea [Hawaii], I cannot imagine it, and I certainly don’t intend to go there.”

Alluding to the continuing role of Pakistan as a Taliban sanctuary, Pardo-Maurer warned, “The shooting match is still very much on. Along the border provinces, you can’t kick a stone over without Bad Guys swarming out like ants and snakes and scorpions.” He recommends staying with a Special Forces strategy “fighting along the Afghans, rather than against them” – “the number one military mistake we could make here is to ‘go conventional’ in this war.” As for “the number one political mistake,” that would be “to actually believe that this place is a country, and that there is such a thing as an Afghan. It is not, and there is not.” “Afghanistan is the place where the world saw fit to stash all the tribes it could not handle elsewhere.” Rumsfeld specifically asked for a copy of the Pardo-Maurer document in a snowflake on September 13, 2002, included here as the cover memo.

In the ongoing debates inside the U.S. government about nation-building in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld insisted that more troops were not the answer, and blamed agencies like State and U.S. AID for the lack of progress. They in turn blamed Rumsfeld for not cooperating with their reconstruction plans and not providing security. He wrote President Bush on August 20, 2002, arguing, “the critical problem in Afghanistan is not really a security problem. Rather, the problem that needs to be addressed is the slow progress that is being made on the civil side.” More troops would backfire, “we could run the risk of ending up being as hated as the Soviets were,” and “without successful reconstruction, no amount of added security forces would be enough.” Yet, because of the “perception that does exist” about security problems, Rumsfeld has assigned a brigadier general (and future U.S. ambassador), Karl Eikenberry, to serve as security coordinator on the staff of the Embassy.

By the fall of 2002, the White House focus centered on the buildup to invading Iraq, to the point that President Bush didn’t even know who his latest commander was in Kabul. This Rumsfeld snowflake, likely to a secretary whose name is redacted on privacy grounds (b6), recounts seeing Bush in the Oval Office on October 21, 2002, asking if he wanted to meet with General Franks (head of Central Command) and General McNeill, and noticing that Bush was quite puzzled. “He said, ‘Who is General McNeill?’ I said he is the general in charge of Afghanistan. He said, ‘Well, I don’t need to meet with him.”

This September 2003 memo from the Secretary of Defense to his top intelligence aide, Steve Cambone, laments that nearly two years into the Afghan war, they still don’t know the enemy. “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq. I read all the intel from the community and it sounds as thought [sic] we know a great deal, but in fact, when you push at it, you find out we haven’t got anything that is actionable.”

Three years into the U.S. nation building project, the Combined Forces Command Afghanistan sent Washington one of its regular “Security Updates” with a two-page list of “ANP Horror Stories” on pages 41 and 42. Police training at that point was in the hands of the State Department (or more precisely, its contractors), which took over from an early failed attempt led by the Germans. So the Secretary of Defense makes sure to alert the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, about this “serious problem,” claiming that the two pages “were written in as graceful and non-inflammatory a way as is humanly possible.” Illiterate, underequipped, and unprepared, the police force seemingly had gained little from years of training by State Department contractors, perhaps mainly because police pay was so low that they extorted the very people they were supposed to protect. Later in 2005, the U.S. military would take over police training, and still fail to produce a professional force, not least because the whole idea was foreign to rural Afghans, who settled disputes primarily through village elders.

Document 10

Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department

Ronald Neumann arrived in Kabul as the U.S. ambassador in July 2005, with a long history of connection there as the son of a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. He quickly sized up corruption as “a major threat to the country’s future” describing it as a “long tradition [that] grows like Topsy.” Neumann’s cable ascribes the endemic corruption to multiple factors, “privation” in the form of low official salaries, “insecurity” in the form of 35 years of war, “more foreign ‘loot’” especially the billions coming in from the U.S., “exposure to the outside world” of people better off materially, and “universality” in the sense that everyone was doing it. Neumann also acknowledges the reality that the U.S. was working with “some unsavory political figures” out of necessity. Redacted when the cable was declassified in 2011 are the specific names Neumann reported, and the specific actions he was recommending, but the full version released in 2014 revealed that at the top of his list was an untouchable – Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother, whom the CIA had paid for years, along with a number of provincial governors, most on U.S. covert payrolls as well. The cable also flags the second front in the Bush Afghan war – narcotics – reporting “opium could strangle the legitimate Afghanistan state in its cradle;” yet, rural Afghans relied on poppy production as their only lucrative crop.

Document 11

In this cable framed as a personal letter to the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann leads off with an ominous quote from a Taliban leader: "You have all the clocks but we have all the time." Neumann’s plea is for more resources in order to achieve “victory.” He says the U.S. is failing to fund and support fully the activities needed to bolster the Afghan economy, infrastructure, and reconstruction, and that failure is harming the American mission. "We have dared so greatly, and spent so much in blood and money that to try to skimp on what is needed for victory seems to me too risky." The Ambassador notes, "the supplemental decision recommendation to minimize economic assistance and leave out infrastructure plays into the Taliban strategy, not to ours." He warns that Taliban leaders are issuing statements that the U.S. would grow increasingly weary, while they gained momentum.

Document 12

U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann writes Washington again in February 2006 with some prescient warnings. He reports that violence in Afghanistan is on the rise but claims “violence does not indicate a failing policy; on the contrary we need to persevere in what we are doing.” Large unit force-on-force engagements devastated the Taliban in previous years, but “the Taliban now seems to understand the propaganda value of the [suicide] bomb and will use it to maximum advantage.” Ambassador Neumann defends the importance of “our work with the GOA [Government of Afghanistan] to extend and deepen its reach nationwide.” “The Taliban need not be intellectual giants to understand that their long-term strategy depends on keeping the government weak in the provinces.” Neumann says the insurgency is getting stronger largely due to the “four years that the Taliban has had to reorganize and think about their approach in a sanctuary [tribal areas in Pakistan] beyond the reach of either [Kabul or Islamabad].” If this sanctuary is “left unaddressed, it will also lead to the re-emergence of the same strategic threat to the United States that prompted our OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom] intervention over 4 years ago.”

Document 13

During May 2006, U.S. Central Command asked the eminent retired four-star general, Barry McCaffrey, to visit Afghanistan and Pakistan and make an assessment of the war (as he had done several times in Iraq). Gen. McCaffrey had served as the drug czar under President Clinton, commanded the “left hook” in the first Gulf War that destroyed so much of the Iraqi army, and won multiple medals for valor and for wounds during the Vietnam war, so his views had significant credibility. Here Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld recommends McCaffrey to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The McCaffrey document is couched as a report to his department chairs at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) where he was an adjunct professor. The cover “snowflake” from Rumsfeld catches only a couple of points from McCaffrey: the lack of small arms for Afghan forces, and the recommendation for almost doubling the size of the Afghan army.

The full document presents a fascinating on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand story, praising U.S. and allied troops as well as Hamid Karzai while acknowledging rising violence and Taliban regrouping to the level of battalion-size engagements. McCaffrey warns that the Afghan leadership are “collectively terrified that we will tip-toe out of Afghanistan in the coming few years” and do not believe the U.S. is committed “to stay with them for the fifteen years required to create an independent functional nation-state which can survive in this dangerous part of the world.” He recommends almost doubling the size of the Afghan army (whose “courageous” troops “operate like armed mountain goats in the severe terrain”), claiming “[a] well-equipped, multi-ethnic, literate, and trained Afghan National Army is our ticket to be fully out of country in the year 2020.” A different ticket would be punched in 2021, not least because the Army never achieved any of McCaffrey’s four objectives. McCaffrey saw the Afghan police as “disastrous” but could only think of more money plus adding “a thousand jails, a hundred courts, and a dozen prisons.”

McCaffrey provocatively leads his section on Pakistan with this query: “The central question seems to be – are the Pakistanis playing a giant double-cross in which they absorb one billion dollars a year from the U.S. while pretending to support U.S. objectives to create a stable Afghanistan – while in fact actively supporting cross-border operations of the Taliban (that they created) – in order to give themselves a weak rear area threat for their central struggle with the Indians?” He goes on to doubt that Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf was playing a deliberate double game, yet even phrasing the question in this way was striking, compared to Rumsfeld’s repeated public praise for Musharraf. Only two months later, Rumsfeld’s own civilian adviser, Dr. Marin Strmecki, would give him an even more detailed report entitled “Afghanistan at a Crossroads,” in which Strmecki doesn’t even see it as a question: “Since 2002, the Taliban has enjoyed a sanctuary in Pakistan.”

Document 14

U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann warns Washington in this cable that "we are not winning in Afghanistan; although we are far from losing" (that would take another 14 years). Echoing Gen. McCaffrey’s conclusions (Document 13), Neumann says the primary problem is a lack of political will to provide additional resources to bolster current strategy and to match increasing Taliban offensives. "At the present level of resources we can make incremental progress in some parts of the country, cannot be certain of victory, and could face serious slippage if the desperate popular quest for security continues to generate Afghan support for the Taliban .... Our margin for victory in a complex environment is shrinking, and we need to act now." The Taliban believe they are winning. That perception "scares the hell out of Afghans." "We are too slow." Rapidly increasing certain strategic initiatives such as equipping Afghan forces, taking out the Taliban leadership in Pakistan, and investing heavily in infrastructure can help the Americans regain the upper hand, Neumann declares. "We can still win. We are pursuing the right general policies on governance, security and development. But because we have not adjusted resources to the pace of the increased Taliban offensive and loss of internal Afghan support we face escalating risks today."

Document 15

Declassified by Department of Defense, September 2009

This is the key document behind the Obama “surge” in Afghanistan that produced the highest U.S. troop levels in the whole 20-year war. President Obama’s holdover Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, had abruptly fired the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, after only 11 months, and replaced him with a Special Operations general named Stanley McChrystal, a favorite of Central Command head Gen. David Petraeus, and an acolyte of the Petraeus counterinsurgency approach that had apparently succeeded in Iraq (critics said top Iraqi clerics had simply ordered a truce, for their own reasons). This 66-page assessment had a convoluted public history: written in August 2009, it leaked to the Washington Post in September, likely as part of Pentagon pressure on Obama to approve more troops, and the Pentagon declassified it right away. The McChrystal strategy called for a “properly resourced” counterinsurgency campaign, with at least 40,000 and as many as 60,000 more U.S. troops and massive aid, especially to build up the Afghan army. He wrote, “I believe the short-term fight will be decisive. Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) – while Afghan security capacity matures – risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

McChrystal asked for 60,000 troops, Obama gave him 30,000 but with an 18-month deadline before they would start coming home, and neither the surge nor the deadline ever produced any “maturity” in Afghan security capacity. Testifying to the Senate in December 2009, McChrystal flatly declared “the next eighteen months will likely be decisive and ultimately enable success. In fact, we are going to win.” His 66 pages remain a testament to American military hubris, full of questionable assumptions – that most Afghans saw the Taliban as oppressors and would side with a government installed by foreigners, that most Afghans shared a national identity, and that the Pakistan sanctuaries would not keep the Taliban going indefinitely.

Document 16

The New York Times, Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Envoy’s Cables Show Worries on Afghan Plans,” January 25, 2010

During the Obama debate over whether to surge or not in Afghanistan, some of the strongest criticism of the McChrystal and Pentagon proposals for expanding the military footprint came from inside the government in classified channels – specifically from the former general who had served multiple tours in Afghanistan (Rumsfeld’s first “security coordinator”) and now served as Obama’s ambassador, Karl Eikenberry. This highly classified November 6, 2009, cable, captioned NODIS ARIES, is couched as a personal letter from Eikenberry to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, opposing the proposed troop influx, the vastly increased costs, the concomitant need for yet more civilians, and the resulting increase in Afghan dependency. Eikenberry spells out his reasons: first that Hamid Karzai “is not an adequate strategic partner” – “[h]e and much of his circle are only too happy to see us invest further. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending war on terror and for military bases to use against surrounding powers.” Second, “we overestimate the ability of Afghan security forces to take over.” Perhaps most important, “[m]ore troops won’t end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries remain,” and “Pakistan will remain the single greatest source of Afghan instability.”

Document 17

This follow-up cable (see Document 16) by Ambassador Eikenberry to Secretary Clinton, for her “eyes only,” may have undercut his earlier strong argument against the proposed troop surge. It’s possible that Clinton may have pushed back, or Eikenberry got word his opposition was unwelcome – her side of the correspondence is still classified. Here, Eikenberry just asks for more time to deliberate, a more wide-ranging process, looking at more options other than military counterinsurgency, and convening a high-level expert panel. He admits that more troops “will yield more security wherever they deploy, for as long as they stay.” But he points to the previous troop increase in 2008-2009, amounting to 30,000 soldiers, and says “overall violence and instability in Afghanistan intensified.” Neither the Afghan army nor government “has demonstrated the will or ability to take over lead security responsibility,” he continues. There is “scant reason to expect that further increases will further advance our strategic purposes; instead, they will dig us in more deeply.” Eikenberry lost this debate, and the Obama-Gates-McChrystal troop surge produced all-time high levels of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Document 18

Washington Post, The Afghanistan Papers, Freedom of Information lawsuit against SIGAR

Among the hundreds of “lessons learned” interviews undertaken by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and obtained by Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post through two Freedom of Information lawsuits, this one stands out for its long view, its self-critical perspective, and its high policy level. Richard Boucher was the longest-serving State Department spokesman in history, starting under Madeline Albright, continuing under Colin Powell and even Condoleezza Rice, before taking over the South Asia portfolio at State from 2006 through 2009. Boucher candidly told the SIGAR interviewers in October 2015, “Did we know what we were doing – I think the answer is no. First we went in to get al-Qaeda, and to get al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, and even without killing Bin Laden we did that. The Taliban was shooting back at us so we started shooting at them and they became the enemy. Ultimately, we kept expanding the mission.” Boucher confessed, “If there was ever a notion of mission creep it is Afghanistan.” His 12 pages of interview transcript include multiple striking observations worth reading in full, about corruption, about local governance and the lack thereof, about the U.S. military’s can-do attitude and where it leads, about roads not taken. His judgment about Afghanistan comes down to a long view: “The only time this country has worked properly was when it was a floating pool of tribes and warlords presided over by someone who had a certain eminence who was able to centralize them to the extent that they didn’t fight each other too much. I think this idea that we went in with, that this was going to become a state government like a U.S. state or something like that, was just wrong and is what condemned us to fifteen years of war instead of two or three.”

Document 19

SIGAR https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/testimony/SIGAR-20-19-TY.pdf

Congress created the SIGAR office in 2008 to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan, and this statement marked the 22nd time the incumbent, John Sopko, had testified before Congress. The proximate cause of this hearing was the Washington Post publication in December 2019 of “The Afghanistan Papers” series by Craig Whitlock, based in large part on the Post’ s successful lawsuit against SIGAR to obtain copies of the hundreds of “lessons learned” interviews Sopko’s office had done with former policy makers, contractors, and military veterans of Afghanistan. Whitlock also relied on documents the National Security Archive had won through FOIA, notably the Donald Rumsfeld “snowflakes,” and concluded that the U.S. government had systematically misled the public about ostensible progress over nearly two decades in Afghanistan.

Whitlock himself covered this hearing, and his story included even more colorful quotations, apparently from the Q&A period, than can be found in this prepared testimony. For example, “There’s an odor of mendacity throughout the Afghanistan issue … mendacity and hubris.” “The problem is there is a disincentive, really, to tell the truth. We have created an incentive to almost require people to lie.” “When we talk about mendacity, when we talk about lying, it’s not just lying about a particular program. It’s lying by omissions. It turns out that everything that is bad news has been classified for the last few years.” (See Craig Whitlock, “Afghan war plagued by ‘mendacity’ and lies, inspector general tells Congress,” Washington Post , January 15, 2020.)

But the prepared statement is almost as chilling. Sopko told Congress that the system of rotation of U.S. personnel after a year or less in Afghanistan amounted to an “annual lobotomy.” Sopko gave specific examples of fake data and faulty metrics permeating the reconstruction effort: “Unfortunately, many of the claims that State, USAID, and others have made over time simply do not stand up to scrutiny.” Not least, Sopko concluded that “Unchecked corruption in Afghanistan undermined U.S. strategic goals – and we helped to foster that corruption” through “alliances of convenience with warlords” and “flood[ing] a small, weak economy with too much money, too fast.”

Document 20

SIGAR https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/quarterlyreports/2021-07-30qr-section2-security.pdf

This most recent quarterly report from the Special Inspector General provides some noteworthy evidence explaining why Washington would be so surprised by the rapid collapse of Afghan government forces in the two weeks after this was published. The 34-page “security” section leads with the ongoing withdrawal of U.S. and international troops, and the Taliban offensive that “avoided attacking U.S. and Coalition forces.” Maps in the middle of this section (pp. 54-56) show various open-source estimates for Taliban control over Afghani districts, and the report notes that the U.S. military ceased providing any unclassified estimates in 2019. From April to July, apparently, the number of Taliban-controlled districts went from 73 to 221, or more than half the total. Perhaps the most interesting page is page 62, with the sidebar on “the core challenge of properly assessing reconstruction’s effectiveness.” “For years, U.S. taxpayers were told that, although circumstances were difficult, success was achievable.” The document quotes Gen. David Petraeus in 2011, Gen. John Campbell in 2015, Gen. John Nicholson in 2017, and the Pentagon press secretary in 2021 all endorsing the effectiveness of the Afghan security forces. The SIGAR report comments on the $88 billion invested in those forces: “The question of whether that money was well spent will ultimately be answered by the fighting on the ground.”

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• Introduction

Insurgency against communist rule (1978–92)

Conflict after 1992, casualties and repercussions.

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Afghan War , in the history of Afghanistan , the internal conflict that began in 1978 between anticommunist Islamic guerrillas and the Afghan communist government (aided in 1979–89 by Soviet troops), leading to the overthrow of the government in 1992. More broadly, the term also encompasses military activity within Afghanistan after 1992—but apart from the Afghanistan War (2001–14), a U.S.-led invasion launched in response to the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001. By this broader definition, many analysts consider the internal Afghan War as lasting well into the 21st century and overlapping with the U.S.-led Afghanistan War.

The roots of the war lay in the overthrow of the centrist government of President Mohammad Daud Khan in April 1978 by left-wing military officers led by Nur Mohammad Taraki . Power was thereafter shared by two Marxist-Leninist political groups, the People’s (Khalq) Party and the Banner (Parcham) Party , which had earlier emerged from a single organization, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and had reunited in an uneasy coalition shortly before the coup. The new government, which had little popular support, forged close ties with the Soviet Union , launched ruthless purges of all domestic opposition, and began extensive land and social reforms that were bitterly resented by the devoutly Muslim and largely anticommunist population. Insurgencies arose against the government among both tribal and urban groups, and all of these—known collectively as the mujahideen (Arabic: mujāhidūn , “those who engage in jihad ”)—were Islamic in orientation. These uprisings, along with internal fighting and coups within the government between the People’s and Banner factions, prompted the Soviets to invade the country in December 1979, sending in some 30,000 troops and toppling the short-lived presidency of People’s leader Hafizullah Amin . The aim of the Soviet operation was to prop up their new but faltering client state, now headed by Banner leader Babrak Karmal , but the mujahideen rebellion grew in response, spreading to all parts of the country. The Soviets initially left the suppression of the rebellion to the Afghan army, but the latter was beset by mass desertions and remained largely ineffective throughout the war.

The Afghan War quickly settled down into a stalemate, with about 100,000 Soviet troops controlling the cities, larger towns, and major garrisons and the mujahideen moving with relative freedom throughout the countryside. Soviet troops tried to crush the insurgency by various tactics, but the guerrillas generally eluded their attacks. The Soviets then attempted to eliminate the mujahideen’s civilian support by bombing and depopulating the rural areas. These tactics sparked a massive flight from the countryside; by 1982 some 2.8 million Afghans had sought asylum in Pakistan , and another 1.5 million had fled to Iran . The mujahideen were eventually able to neutralize Soviet air power through the use of shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles supplied by the Soviet Union’s Cold War adversary, the United States .

The mujahideen were fragmented politically into a handful of independent groups, and their military efforts remained uncoordinated throughout the war. The quality of their arms and combat organization gradually improved, however, owing to experience and to the large quantity of arms and other war matériel shipped to the rebels, via Pakistan, by the United States and other countries and by sympathetic Muslims from throughout the world. In addition, an indeterminate number of Muslim volunteers—popularly termed “Afghan-Arabs,” regardless of their ethnicity—traveled from all parts of the world to join the opposition.

The war in Afghanistan became a quagmire for what by the late 1980s was a disintegrating Soviet Union. (The Soviets suffered some 15,000 dead and many more injured.) In 1988 the United States, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union signed an agreement by which the latter would withdraw its troops (completed in 1989), and Afghanistan returned to nonaligned status. In April 1992 various rebel groups, together with newly rebellious government troops, stormed the besieged capital of Kabul and overthrew the communist president, Najibullah , who had succeeded Karmal in 1986.

A transitional government, sponsored by various rebel factions, proclaimed an Islamic republic, but jubilation was short-lived. President Burhanuddin Rabbani, leader of the Islamic Society (Jamʿiyyat-e Eslāmī), a major mujahideen group, refused to leave office in accordance with the power-sharing arrangement reached by the new government. Other mujahideen groups, particularly the Islamic Party (Ḥezb-e Eslāmī), led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, surrounded Kabul and began to barrage the city with artillery and rockets. These attacks continued intermittently over the next several years as the countryside outside Kabul slipped into chaos .

Partly as a response, the Taliban (Pashto: “Students”), a puritanical Islamic group led by a former mujahideen commander, Mohammad Omar , emerged in the fall of 1994 and systematically seized control of the country, occupying Kabul in 1996. The Taliban—augmented by volunteers from various Islamic extremist groups sheltering in Afghanistan, many of whom were Afghan-Arab holdovers from the earlier conflict—soon controlled all but a small portion of northern Afghanistan, which was held by a loose coalition of mujahideen forces known as the Northern Alliance . Fighting continued at a stalemate until 2001, when the Taliban refused demands by the U.S. government to extradite Saudi Arabian exile Osama bin Laden , the leader of an Islamic extremist group, al-Qaeda , which had close ties with the Taliban and was accused of having launched terrorist attacks against the United States, including the group of devastating strikes on September 11. Subsequently, U.S. special operations forces, allied with Northern Alliance fighters, launched a series of military operations in Afghanistan that drove the Taliban from power by early December. ( See Afghanistan War .) After a period of transitional interim government, a republic was established in 2004, but the new government struggled well into the 21st century to secure centralized authority over the country against a powerful Taliban insurgency.

Afghanistan has never conducted a full census, and it is thus difficult to gauge the number of casualties suffered in the country since the outbreak of fighting. The best estimates available indicate that some 1.5 million Afghanis were killed before 1992—although the number killed during combat and the number killed as an indirect result of the conflict remain unclear. The casualty rate after 1992 is even less precise. Many thousands were killed as a direct result of factional fighting; hundreds or thousands of prisoners and civilians were executed by tribal, ethnic, or religious rivals; and a large number of combatants—and some noncombatants—were killed during the U.S. offensive. Moreover, tens of thousands died of starvation or of a variety of diseases, many of which in less-troubled times could have been easily treated, and hundreds of thousands were killed or injured by the numerous land mines in the country. (Afghanistan was, by the end of the 20th century, one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, and vast quantities of unexploded ordnance littered the countryside.) The number of Afghan refugees living abroad fluctuated over the years with the fighting and reached a peak of some six million people in the late 1980s.

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The American War in Afghanistan: A History

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The American War in Afghanistan is a full history of the war in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2020. It covers political, cultural, strategic, and tactical aspects of the war and details the actions and decision-making of the United States, Afghan government, and Taliban. The work follows a narrative format to go through the 2001 US invasion, the state-building of 2002–2005, the Taliban offensive of 2006, the US surge of 2009–2011, the subsequent drawdown, and the peace talks of 2019–2020. The focus is on the overarching questions of the war: Why did the United States fail? What opportunities existed to reach a better outcome? Why did the United States not withdraw from the war?

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Twenty years of war: America magazine’s coverage of Afghanistan

The dramatic scenes unfolding in Kabul as Taliban forces overrun the last remaining government-held positions in Afghanistan’s capital have come as a shock to many American observers both on the ground and from afar. For those who remember the fall of Saigon in 1975, it has been a bitter repeat of history . A war that seemed eminently winnable—and justifiable—at its outset instead became a two-decade quagmire, and one that has left innocent noncombatants facing profound danger.

This is an occasion for all Americans to look back at our justifications for invading Afghanistan, our reasons for staying and our rationale for withdrawal. Where did it all go wrong? Or was the venture ill-fated from the start? Too many are dead for glib analyses to be appropriate, but a reckoning remains necessary. We at America have looked back over our coverage of Afghanistan since 2001, with some of the most pertinent accounts excerpted below.

The editors of America first weighed in on the situation in Afghanistan just a few short weeks after the United States began combat actions in that country following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 1, 2001. In the months and years that followed, the editors and other contributors weighed in with their reflections on and analyses of an increasingly fraught situation.

2001: "By their actions, the terrorists have declared war on the United States, and we certainly have the right under the just war theory to defend ourselves with military force."

A Just War? (the Editors, Oct. 8, 2001)

The United States is going to wage a war against terrorists, says President George W. Bush. Is this a just war according to the principles of the Catholic just war theory? For this issue we asked experts in the just war theory to examine this question and present their views.

Before looking at the U.S. response, it is important to make clear that the terrorists’ attacks violated almost every principle of the just war theory. First, wars can be waged only by legitimate authorities of a state. They cannot be declared by anyone who feels he has a just cause. The terrorists are not government officials. Second, the attack on the World Trade Center was directed at civilians who, according to the principle of civilian immunity, should not be targeted. And even if the Pentagon could be considered a military target, using a plane loaded with innocent civilians as a bomb is unacceptable.

By their actions, the terrorists have declared war on the United States, and we certainly have the right under the just war theory to defend ourselves with military force. But before we go too far down this path, we should ask if the use of the word war is apt. The use of the word by the president is rhetorically satisfying. It makes clear that this is a serious endeavor that will take great effort and sacrifice. But calling our response war gives the terrorists a stature that they do not deserve. It treats them like a government, when in fact they are more like organized criminals: mass murderers, not soldiers. Treating terrorists as criminals does not mean that the use of deadly force is ruled out. Police have the right to use deadly force to protect themselves and others from harm.

The rhetoric of war also makes it easier for the president to argue that we will treat nations that support terrorism in the same way that we deal with terrorists. This is easy to say, but difficult to carry out. If we discover that a foreign intelligence service gave money, arms or forged documents to Osama bin Laden, do we bomb the country? Do we bomb the offices of the intelligence service? What if the government did not know the resources were going to be used in the attack on the United States? Since the U.S. government has stated that a number of countries support terrorist groups, we could quickly be at war on many fronts.

But granting that the rhetoric of war has captured the day, it is appropriate to use the just war theory to guide us in our response. Read more...

War in Afghanistan (the Editors, Oct. 29, 2001)

The aerial attack by the United States on terrorist and Taliban targets in Afghanistan has been declared a just war by a number of Catholic leaders, including some bishops and cardinals. While we hope that the war is brought to a swift and just conclusion, such certitude, at this point, is hard to echo. There is no question that stopping terrorism is a just cause. But waging war under the just war doctrine must be the last resort, after diplomatic, economic and other means have failed. Was a month enough time to exhaust these options? This is unclear.

….Once the obvious military targets are destroyed, what do we bomb next? From the beginning, the administration has thought of this struggle primarily in military terms, but the war on terrorism cannot be won simply with bullets. The United States needs the support not only of the elites governing Muslim countries, but also of Muslim public opinion. That is why it was foolish for the administration to wait a month before accepting invitations to appear on Al Jazeera, an independent all-news satellite channel based in Qatar, which could be used to send our message to the Muslim world. This war will not be won in the mountains of Afghanistan. It will be won when Muslims are convinced that the United States acts justly. Read more...

How Goes the Coalition? (the Editors, Nov. 26, 2001)

….The Taliban retreat from Kabul will both strengthen and challenge the coalition. On the one hand, nothing strengthens a coalition like victories. On the other hand, the international coalition must now quickly find an Afghan coalition that can govern without intertribal bloodshed.

For the ultimate success of the campaign, international cooperation is indispensable, because the terrorist networks are spread across 60 nations. The coalition is not an association as formal as an alliance, but it must be held together. In an age of global interconnectedness, even a superpower cannot behave like some sheriff at high noon. If the coalition is sluggish, that’s bad luck. If the United States tries to go it alone in the campaign against terrorism, that will be more than a misfortune. It will be a perilous mistake. Read more...

2001: "In an age of global interconnectedness, even a superpower cannot behave like some sheriff at high noon."

Afghanistan Part II (the Editors, March 4, 2002)

The Bush administration has waged an effective war in Afghanistan, and, for the most part, has waged it in a just manner. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we wrote that the terrorists should be brought to justice because of their crimes and because of the danger they pose to life in this country and elsewhere. If this cannot be done peacefully, then they are legitimate targets of military action.

….While the Bush administration deserves praise, its policies have not been without defects. Many Al Qaeda and Taliban troops escaped into the mountains or Pakistan. In addition, the administration lost the moral high ground by arguing that the captives taken during the war were not covered by the Geneva conventions governing prisoners, a position it was ultimately forced to reverse. Now it is trying to convince a skeptical world that there is a difference between the Taliban soldiers and the Al Qaeda terrorists, a distinction that it could have made more successfully if it had not earlier tried to ignore the Geneva conventions. In addition, allegations that U.S. soldiers have beaten captives are alarming. The facilities holding prisoners should be immediately opened to international inspection by the Red Cross and Red Crescent.

The first casualty of war, the saying goes, is the truth. While secrecy is vital to protect military plans, post-battle secrecy breeds suspicion and prevents us from learning from our mistakes. The military would have more credibility if it acknowledged quickly and forthrightly civilian casualties and other military mistakes. To assert, for example, against all evidence that those killed at the village of Chowkar-Karez, outside Kandahar, were enemy soldiers, renders suspect all information given out by the military. Better to admit the mistake, apologize, make reparations and strive to do better.

Apologies and reparations would do much to show the Afghan people that we, unlike so many previous foreign powers, are different: we care about their welfare. Estimates of civilian casualties from the war range from 1,000 to 4,000. Justice demands that we spend at least part of our military budget to help those innocent civilians who were wounded, widowed or orphaned by U.S. weapons. We also have an obligation to retrieve and destroy unexploded ordnance, lest more innocents suffer from the war.

Rebuilding Afghanistan politically and economically will not be easy. Read more...

2002: "The Bush administration has waged an effective war in Afghanistan, and, for the most part, has waged it in a just manner."

The First Anniversary of 9/11 (the Editors, Sept. 9, 2002)

….In December, Washington was congratulating itself on defeating the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and expelling the Al Qaeda terrorists from that country—although, tragically, a significant number of noncombatant civilians were killed in the process.

But on the anniversary of 9/11, the new Afghan government remains highly unstable; the partners in the anti-terrorist coalition are growing ever more critical of U.S. leadership; the Al Qaeda leaders have not been found, much less immobilized; there is frightening talk within Congress and the administration of war with Iraq; and all the while Americans are continually assured by experts that new and more dreadful terrorist attacks are a certainty.

It is often said that 9/11 marked the beginning of a new age. It should also be said that if this age is to eliminate terrorism, it must be guided by the truth that Pope John Paul II repeated over and over in his message for the 2002 World Day of Peace: “No peace without justice; no justice without forgiveness.” Read more...

The True Costs of War (May 16, 2006)

….The campaign against international terrorism confronts a new kind of challenge. Unlike conventional wars between nation-states or the decades-long confrontation of the cold war, this campaign will not conclude with a surrender or a treaty. When the two global superpowers confronted each other in a climate of mutual assured destruction, the danger was all too real, but the competing interests of the adversaries were clear. Such clarity is not present in the campaign against international terrorism. Suicide bombers will not be defeated by missiles and tanks but by the promise of a life of opportunity with hope for future generations. While military responses to clearly defined targets must be part of our response to terrorist attacks, the fundamental and continuing conflict will be one of ideals and values. If American citizens accept the diminishment of constitutional safeguards and American values without protest, we will slowly surrender our most valuable resource in the continuing campaign against terrorism. By failing to understand our adversaries, we run the risk of becoming their mirror images. Read more...

Up or Out (Dec. 7, 2009)

Afghanistan, we are told, is the “graveyard of empires.” Visitors to the recent roving exhibit “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures From the National Museum, Kabul” will know that description is an exaggeration. For Alexander the Great and his followers, it turns out, established colonial cities across northern and western Afghanistan. So not every foreign expedition has stumbled into disaster, like the ill-fated British and Indian troops annihilated in 1842 in the First Afghan War. Nonetheless, today Afghanistan does represent an extraordinary military and diplomatic challenge for the United States. The terrain is rugged, the climate inhospitable to invading armies. Its population consists of at least nine ethnic groups who speak more than 30 languages. Its tribal culture is, to put it kindly, highly defensive and its people skilled in irregular warfare. When the illegitimacy and corruption of the government in Kabul and the weakness of its police and military are added in, waging a counter-insurgency/counter-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan is a test of extraordinary complexity.

President Obama’s long, drawn-out deliberation on Afghan strategy is not just due to his rational temperament, as his kinder critics have suggested. It is demanded by the multiple challenges Afghanistan presents any outside power seeking to shape events in what Maryann Cusimano Love aptly called “a fictional state.” In this context, deliberation is an asset, but it cannot assure a happy outcome. Whatever the strategy, however focused the goals, war and nation-building are both chancy undertakings. The principal issue that we believe should be weighed as the nation moves ahead is the human capacity of the U.S. military to wage this war. Read more...

2006: "By failing to understand our adversaries, we run the risk of becoming their mirror images."

Hold to the Deadline (Sept. 13, 2010)

The Taliban, according to a cover story in Time on July 29, ordered the nose of 19-year-old Bibi Aisha cut off to punish her for fleeing her husband’s family, where she was being abused. Later they shot 10 aid workers and stoned to death a young couple who had eloped. If NATO leaves Afghanistan, many tell us, such atrocities will continue. But Aisha’s husband, not the Taliban, cut off her nose; and the almost 100,000 foreign troops have failed to reform brutal tribal customs during the nine years they have fought there.

Meanwhile, civilian casualties rise. The U.S. policy is to avoid killing civilians, even at risk to our troops; but recent reports of 52 people, mainly women and children, killed in the Helmand province—condemned as “morally and humanly unacceptable” by President Hamid Karzai—and another 32 a week later, demonstrate that drones and rockets fail to distinguish sufficiently between the enemy and the innocent. According to U.N. reports, in 2009 the great majority of the 2,412 civilian victims were killed by insurgents; 596 were killed by the United States, mostly by air strikes. Nevertheless, local polls show that Afghans, particularly in the villages, blame the foreigners for civilian deaths.

Each week the parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam become more vivid: the corrupt America-sponsored government; our troops bogged down in a hostile culture and terrain; our military leadership plugged into its “can do” philosophy; our domestic economy stretched to the breaking point; a public uninformed and unconvinced of the war’s necessity; and a president stuck with a premature decision to fight and determined not to become, in Richard Nixon’s words, “the first president to lose a war.”

Americans must face the fact that we cannot control the world. Given the current burdens on our military and our economic problems, we cannot remake a nation in our image. Read this...

Out of Afghanistan (Aug. 15, 2011)

Congressman Walter Jones Jr., of North Carolina, has undergone a thorough conversion. A Democrat, he became a conservative Republican; a Baptist, he became a Catholic. He supported the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; now he sends hand-written letters of condolence to the American families who have lost a son or daughter. He told George C. Wilson in The Nation (6/13) that he deals with the guilt over having voted for both wars because he was “not strong enough to vote my conscience as a man of faith.” Mr. Jones and his 13-member Out-of-Afghanistan caucus plan to push the war to the forefront in the presidential primaries. Public support for the war has fallen. Only 43 percent of Americans feel it is worth fighting, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll (6/7). A Pew survey on June 21 found that 56 percent wanted troops out as soon as possible and only 39 percent supported staying until the situation stabilized.

In June, 40 religious leaders from all faiths wrote to President Obama that it is time to bring the war in Afghanistan to an end. What began as a response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they contended, has become an open-ended war against a Taliban insurgency. Read this...

2013: "Killing civilians is not only immoral but also strategically counterproductive."

Our Sacred Dead (Oct. 23, 2013)

….As the war in Afghanistan intensified in 2008, the effort to keep count of civilian deaths increased, though many agreed the data gathered from Western media reports represented only the tip of the iceberg. The tension between the United Nations and United States increased. The coalition would claim they had killed insurgents, but the local population would tell the United Nations that the victims were farmers. A U.S. bombing in September 2008 killed 92 civilians in one village, and in May 2009 another airstrike killed 140. WikiLeaks revealed in July 2010 that the U.S. military secretly maintained files concerning 4,024 Afghan civilian war deaths between 2004 and 2009.

Killing civilians is not only immoral but also strategically counterproductive. Whether an attack using drones, or night raids on the ground, these actions lead only to new recruits for the Taliban. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal often called this “insurgent math,” and his aide said every additional civilian casualty generates 20 more insurgents, an increase in road bombs and an additional violent clash between insurgents and U.S. troops in the following six weeks.

In U.S. culture, respect for human life is narrow, sometimes to the point of indifference to the fate of innocent persons who are not military enemies, but whom we kill. We are slow to see those designated “terrorists” as our brothers and sisters. There is a need for a truly independent agency, akin to the Government Accountability Office, to record and publish the names and number of civilians killed on all sides of a conflict. The nightly news should acknowledge both American and foreign dead. Memorials and liturgies that demonstrate respect for all the victims of war would give life to the most challenging words in the Sermon on the Mount. Read more...

As a soldier I was loved for my sins. Now I must repent for them (Peter Lucier, May 17, 2019)

….The Catholic faith tells us that we are sinners loved by God. I am a sinner who is loved. I struggle with both halves. I don’t always want to admit I am a sinner. What I went over there to do felt righteous. I believed in the cause, and even if I didn’t, I believed in my brothers. I believed in America, and even if I didn’t or didn’t know what America was, I believed in the Marine Corps. I believed in violence, in purpose, in our community, our brotherhood. I wanted to receive the sacrament of confirmation in the military service. I prayed for the opportunity to kill.

I believed in the redemptive power of violence. I was young and golden and fit, on fire with the zeal of a convert. On the firing ranges at the school of infantry, in the mountains of Camp Pendleton, I fell in love with the rhythms of squad fire and maneuver—the geometries of fire, crisp left and right lateral limits, the steady drumming of an M249 machine gun zipping rounds into targets. I was born again. I felt clean and right. I slept peacefully at night, tired from an honest day’s work of training to visit violence upon the others. Some days, it is hard to admit I am a sinner.

Other days, it is hard to accept that I am loved. I have not earned it. We went out all those nights and never came back with anything to show for it. The war I fought, I didn’t win. What have I done to deserve love? I have certainly done enough to deserve contempt, to deserve condescension, to deserve belittlement, to deserve hate, even. Pick your sin: pride, anger, despair, selfishness. I am guilty. I went to war feeling entitled. To what exactly? To save. To kill. It didn’t occur to me how arrogant that was until I came home. I carried that self-centeredness into a marriage after I got home and wrecked it. The uniform I wore reminds others of service. It reminds me of all the wrongs I’ve done and continue to do. Some days it is hard to accept love.

As a Marine veteran of Afghanistan, I am a sinner who is loved—and loved in a way I am not always comfortable with. Being a veteran means being venerated here at home. Before every college basketball game I go to, we take a moment to be grateful for our nation “and those who keep it safe.” I am loved with every flyover at a football game, every Fourth of July, every Veterans Day. I feel America’s love for me and for veterans in every “Thank you for your service” and in every “Support the Troops” bumper sticker.

The oftentimes adoring American public does not talk much about my sins, but I feel them acutely. St. Augustine talked about animi dolor , “anguish of the soul.” Animi dolor is the soul’s natural response to war, to killing. I feel viscerally the stains that entering into the morally complex arena of war has left upon my soul. In the American culture, I am loved for my sins. I am loved for being a Marine who went to war.

When I returned from Afghanistan, I needed to find a way to go from being a Marine who is loved for his sins to being a believer who is a sinner but who is loved. I needed to find a way to come home. The church has always offered a path for soldiers coming home from war: the path of penance. It is a hard path, both for veterans and for the families and communities to which they are trying to return. But if we really believe in the message and truth of the cross, and if veterans are to truly become again members of the community, we are compelled to take this route. Read more...

The Afghanistan Papers make clear that America has a repentance problem (Drew Christiansen, S.J., Dec. 17, 2019)

We have been here before. In 1964 there was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution , and in 1971 came the publication of the Pentagon Papers . In 1979, David Halberstam laid the blame for the Vietnam War at the feet of “ the best and the brightest .” Not until four decades later in 2004, in the film “ The Fog of War ,” did Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, own his culpability in that conflict.

In 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney and the hawkish neo-cons of the Bush administration led the United States to war under false pretenses once again, this time in Iraq. In 2006, the Iraq Study Group , headed by James A. Baker and Lee Hamilton, issued a report listing 79 recommendations to correct and prevent the mistakes and abuses of that war.

The same year, the journalists Seymour Hersh and Mark Danner began extended coverage of the torture committed at Abu Ghraib . We later learned that the C.I.A. had filmed the “enhanced interrogations,” destroyed the tapes so they could not be turned over to investigators and continued applying these grossly immoral techniques even after they had proven ineffective at producing actionable intelligence. The new film “ The Report ” dramatizes an investigation into the torture program by the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California.

Now comes The Washington Post’s release, on Dec. 9, of the so-called Afghanistan Papers —more than 2,000 pages from the Lessons Learned Program at the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, along with other documents. They reveal that, as The Post summarizes, “Year after year, U.S. officials failed to tell the public the truth about the war in Afghanistan.” Once again there was failure at the top, by both civilian and military leaders, in the Bush and Obama administrations and right up to the present.

“The interviews make clear,” the Post reporters write, “that officials issued rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hid unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” They go on to say, “Several of those interviewed described explicit efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public and a culture of willful ignorance, where bad news and critiques were unwelcome.” Americans, it appears, have not learned the lessons of our own past failures. Rather, we seem ensnared in a tragedy of biblical dimensions from which we cannot flee.

The first lesson I draw from the Afghanistan Papers is that U.S. civic culture has lost the capacity for repentance. Read more...

What America needs to know about the Afghanistan Papers (Ryan Di Corpo, Dec. 17, 2019)

The Washington Post released previously unpublished reports and memos related to the ongoing war in Afghanistan on Dec. 9. These 428 interview transcripts and over 2,000 pages of notes , called the Afghanistan Papers, reveal a striking contrast between the private doubts and concerns of numerous ambassadors, military leaders and U.S. government officials and what they told the American public about the war.

More than 600 people sat for interviews with the Office of the Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) as part of its $11 million “ Lessons Learned ” program, which, according to The Post, “was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan.”

The documents are a sobering record of intelligence errors, strategic blunders and sustained, widespread uncertainty regarding the purpose of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan—a nearly $1 trillion endeavor . Since 2001, the war has taken the lives of 2,300 American military personnel and an estimated 43,074 Afghan civilians.

On Oct. 7, 2001, President George W. Bush announced strikes against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. He stated that the purpose of these “carefully targeted actions” was to “disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.” However, as revealed in the newly released Lessons Learned report, former Afghan war czar Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in 2015, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan— we didn’t know what we were doing .”

To help make sense of the Afghanistan Papers, America spoke by phone with Karen J. Greenberg, who has written on matters of terrorism and national security for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. A permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Ms. Greenberg is currently director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What intelligence did the U.S. lack when beginning military operations in Afghanistan? Was the war strategically misguided from the start?

Much of the criticism about the war in Afghanistan was understated, but there are many things we didn’t know. Among them was how exactly this tribal country functions, what role the warlords and others were playing vis-a-vis the United States and other countries. In other words, who to trust, what their actual goals were, how they viewed the Americans.

On Dec. 1, 2009, at West Point, President Obama announced a surge of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and his plan to end U.S. involvement by July 2011. At the time, was it possible for U.S. forces to complete a successful transfer of power to Afghan troops?

Why was the drawdown so hard? In part because there was such opposition to it by officials who wondered, “If we draw down in Afghanistan, then what will happen?” Will Al Qaeda be on the rise again? Will other Islamist terrorist groups will be able to take root? For the most part, Obama’s decision was to draw down, but among many military experts and national security figures, that was a problem. It takes time.

The question was, “How are they going to do it?” Read more...

2020: "An emboldened and patient Taliban appears content to simply wait out the Americans."

As tensions rise with Iran, Afghanistan becomes the longest war in U.S. history (Kevin Clarke, Feb. 5, 2020)

The Afghanistan papers offer a litany of intelligence errors, strategic blunders and expressions of sustained, widespread uncertainty regarding the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. During his interview for Lessons Learned, former Afghan war czar Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in 2015, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan— we didn’t know what we were doing ”—a fitting summary of the sentiment expressed by scores of other combat officers, diplomats and Pentagon strategists who participated in the policy postmortem. According to The Post, those documents reveal “there was no consensus on the war’s objectives, let alone how to end the conflict.”

The same day The Post released its grim exposé, The New York Times published a summary of a report from Brown University’s Cost of War project. According to those researchers, the United States has spent $2.15 trillion so far in efforts to contain the Taliban, Al Qaeda and now ISIS militants and to stabilize Afghanistan’s government and civil society.

During that time, the war has cost the lives of 2,351 American military personnel and an estimated 43,000 Afghan civilians . Yet more than 18 years after U.S. and NATO troops first arrived to begin the longest war in U.S. history, the stable, democratic Afghanistan the United States struggled to establish remains acutely vulnerable to collapse, and an emboldened and patient Taliban appears content to simply wait out the Americans. Read more...

What we owe U.S. veterans who fought in Afghanistan (Matt Malone, S.J., Feb. 18, 2020)

On Feb. 8, 2020, Sgt. First Class Javier Gutierrez, of San Antonio, Tex., and Sgt. First Class Antonio Rodriguez, of Las Cruces, N.M., became the latest U.S. soldiers to die in Afghanistan. They were both 28 years old. Six other American personnel were wounded in the attack, which reportedly came as they were waiting for a helicopter transport in Nangarhar Province. Since the start of the war in 2001, more than 2,300 U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan and more than 20,000 have been wounded.

The war has been far costlier, of course, for Afghan civilians. According to Amnesty International , “in the first nine months of 2019 alone, more than 2,400 children were killed or injured in Afghanistan, making it the deadliest conflict in the world for children.”

You would think that these sobering statistics would keep the war at the forefront of our national consciousness. Instead, most of us hardly think about it. Philip Klay, a former U.S. Marine, described in these pages in 2018 how our mass indifference affected him when he came home from the war in Iraq: “To walk through a city like New York upon return from war, then, felt like witnessing a moral crime.... I was frustrated, coming home, that the American people did not embrace my vision of war.” Mr. Klay went on to explain how his “vision” of the war changed, but I think one could forgive any veteran for feeling what he felt. Read more…

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Chronicle of a Defeat Foretold

Why america failed in afghanistan, by christina lamb.

The American War in Afghanistan: A History

By carter malkasian.

In 2008, I interviewed the United Kingdom’s then outgoing military commander in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, in a dusty firebase in Helmand Province, where international troops had been battling the Taliban on a daily basis for territory that kept slipping away. The war in Afghanistan could not be won militarily, Carleton-Smith told me. He was the first senior coalition military officer to say so publicly, and the story made the front page of the British Sunday Times . U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates promptly denounced Carleton-Smith to the news media as “defeatist.”

Thirteen years on, U.S. President Joe Biden appears to have reached the same conclusion as the British brigadier. In April, Biden announced that the United States would pull all its remaining troops out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11, ending what he referred to as “the forever war.” But by now, such a withdrawal was all but a foregone conclusion: the Taliban had proved a stubborn enemy that was not going anywhere and that indeed controlled close to half the country’s territory.

How the conflict once known as “the good war” (to distinguish it from the war in Iraq) went so wrong is the subject of a new book, The American War in Afghanistan , which claims to be the first comprehensive account of the United States’ longest war. Its author, Carter Malkasian, is a historian who has spent considerable time working in Afghanistan, first as a civilian official in Helmand and then as a senior adviser to the U.S. military commander in the country. A sprawling history of more than 500 pages, the work stands in stark contrast to Malkasian’s previous book, War Comes to Garmser , which tells the compelling story of one small district in Helmand. In his new book, Malkasian considers just how it could be that with as many as 140,000 soldiers in 2011 and some of the world’s most sophisticated equipment, the United States and its NATO allies failed to defeat the Taliban. Moreover, he asks why these Western powers stayed on, at a cost of more than $2 trillion and over 3,500 allied lives lost, plus many more soldiers badly injured, fighting what the British brigadier and others long knew was an unwinnable war.

Fatal Beginnings

The Afghan intervention seemed, at the start, a success story. The United States entered Afghanistan in October 2001 with the backing of the United Nations and fueled by worldwide outrage over the 9/11 attacks. It dispatched B-52 bombers, laser-guided missiles, and Green Berets, who worked alongside local militias to topple the Taliban within 60 days, with the loss of only four U.S. soldiers (three a result of friendly fire) and one CIA agent. The operation seemed a model of intervention and cost a total of $3.8 billion: President George W. Bush described it as one of the biggest “bargains” of all time. Observes Malkasian: “The ease of the 2001 success carried away sensibility.”

The Taliban fell, Osama bin Laden fled to Pakistan—and the Bush administration no longer seemed to know what it was trying to achieve in Afghanistan. Bush made much of women’s rights, declaring in his State of the Union address in January 2002 that “today women of Afghanistan are free,” after “years as captives in their own homes,” when the Taliban forbade girls from going to school and women from working, wearing lipstick, or laughing out loud. But Washington had no appetite for rebuilding Afghanistan and almost no understanding of the war-ravaged country, let alone of how much work would be needed to secure and reconstruct it.

The Afghan intervention seemed, at the start, a success story.

Malkasian argues that the United States made mistakes between 2001 and 2006 that set the course for failure. The catalog of errors he recounts is by now familiar. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did not want to invest in the Afghan army—and by the end of 2003, just 6,000 Afghan soldiers had been trained. Warlords, whom most Afghans blamed for the country’s descent into violence in the first place, roamed free and even became ministers and members of parliament. At the same time, the United States and its allies shut the Taliban out of talks on a political settlement, failing to appreciate that the group represented a point of view that many among the majority Pashtuns shared. The United States should have pressed its advantage, Malkasian suggests, at a time when the Afghan government had popular support and the Taliban were in disarray. Instead, it empowered militias and conducted overly aggressive counterterrorism operations that alienated ordinary Afghans and led the excluded Taliban to resort once more to violence.

Nonetheless, the Bush administration classed Afghanistan as a success and turned its attention to Iraq. The Taliban fled across the border to Pakistan, where they regrouped, raised funds, recruited in the madrasahs, and trained with the assistance of Pakistan’s security service, the Inter-Services Intelligence. Many ISI officers had worked with Taliban leaders for decades and shared their worldview. Moreover, Malkasian notes that Islamabad’s strategic thinking centered on its rivalry with India. Pakistan had fought four wars with its neighbor and feared that India would encircle it by gaining influence in Afghanistan. India had 24 consulates in Afghanistan, Pakistani officials complained; in fact, it had only four.

Pakistan’s role turned out to be fatal. Even as the United States prosecuted its war in Afghanistan, those it fought found refuge and training in the country next door. But the Bush administration not only turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s machinations; it provided Pakistan with $12 billion, more than half of which was a reimbursement for military operations, as American officials believed that Islamabad was helping in what they saw as the more important fight against al Qaeda.

The Heart of Afghanistan

Afghan officials like to blame Pakistan for the deepening war. But the Taliban had something more in its favor—something Malkasian calls “the Taliban’s tie to what it meant to be Afghan.” The heart of Afghanistan, by Malkasian’s description, is the atraf , or countryside, with its mud-walled homes, hidden-away women, and barefoot children, a realm where “other than cell-phones, cars, and assault rifles, the 21st century was invisible.” Into this space came American soldiers with night-vision goggles and missiles the price of Porsches. The last foreigners the villagers had seen were the Russians who occupied their country in the 1980s. The Taliban were able to use that memory as a powerful motivator in a country that prided itself on defeating superpowers and never having been colonized.

Malkasian believes that the Taliban profited from their posture as a force for Islam, against infidels. But my own reporting in Afghanistan suggests a somewhat more ambiguous dynamic. Mullahs in villages would rage against the foreign presence, but they collected their salaries from a government dependent on foreigners. Ordinary Afghans I spoke to suggested that religion was less important to them than pride in their history of defeating superpowers. The fact that the Taliban paid unemployed farmers further boosted the group’s advantage. Moreover, as Malkasian details, the Taliban exploited tribal rivalries that Western forces didn’t understand. Many powerful Pashtun tribes, such as the Ghilzais, the Ishaqzais, and the Noorzais, felt cut out. They resented foreign troops for disrespecting their culture (entering women’s quarters, bombing wedding parties) and attempting to eradicate their poppy crops.

The United States had created conditions that called for a more robust Afghan state than it had built. As Malkasian writes, “If a state faces a hostile safe haven on its border and mistreats various segments of its population, it had best have capable military forces of one form or another.” When the Taliban reemerged in earnest in 2006, their forces were estimated at only 10,000, which should have been containable. But the foreign forces in Afghanistan were unfamiliar with the terrain, both geographic and cultural; the U.S. leadership was distracted by Iraq, where a civil war was spinning out of control; and Afghanistan had not even a small, capable army.

As for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, he was furious about NATO airstrikes and what he saw as British meddling in Helmand, where he had been forced to remove a governor. Increasingly paranoid, rather than unite tribes that might have stepped in to fight the Taliban, he tried to divide them, lest they become a political threat. Later, the Afghan security forces were ramped up and gained numerical superiority over the Taliban and at least equivalent ammunition and supplies. Still, they threw in the towel at decisive moments. “The Taliban had an edge in inspiration,” writes Malkasian. “The average soldier and policeman simply wanted to fight less than his Taliban counterpart. Many could not reconcile fighting for Afghanistan alongside an infidel occupier and against a movement that represented Islam.”

In stressing the religious dimension, however, Malkasian overlooks more material conditions that sapped motivation from many Afghan fighters. Some were reluctant to fight for a government whose insatiable demand for bribes they felt was the bane of their lives. Others were well aware that there would be no medevacs for injured security forces and that corrupt commanders were siphoning off their fuel and supplies, as well as pocketing the pay for “ghost fighters,” who existed only on the books. They saw little utility in risking their lives for a predatory government when the Taliban seemed just as likely to return.

The Clocks and the Time

The United States, sucked in ever deeper, seemed to exhaust every strategy, from maintaining a light footprint to surging U.S. troops, increasing them almost threefold, to more than 80,000 by 2010. President Barack Obama, who was constitutionally wary of pouring troops and dollars into military interventions, and who had opposed the war in Iraq at its inception, found himself sending more and more Americans to prop up a government that had lost the trust of its people. But he never considered getting out altogether: the cost was just too high. “The United States was stuck,” writes Malkasian. And the Taliban expanded their influence with the support of Iran and Russia, both of which were interested in making life hard for the Americans.

So how did Washington come unstuck, and why now? U.S. President Donald Trump, with his “America first” policy, was never going to have much time for Afghanistan; indeed, one of his campaign promises was to end the war. By the autumn of 2018, with midterm elections approaching, Trump raged to his generals that their strategy had been “a total failure” and he wanted out. For the first time, talks with the Taliban took on real urgency. In February 2020, Washington signed a deal promising withdrawal by May 1, 2021. The Afghan government had been completely excluded from these negotiations. When Biden came into office, Kabul hoped the new president would not only delay the withdrawal but also leave a permanent force in place. In the end, it got only four months’ grace.

In announcing a September pullout, Biden argued that the United States should “be focused on the reason we went in the first place: to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again. We did that. We accomplished that objective.” But even this point is not entirely clear-cut. True, there hasn’t been an attack from Afghanistan since 9/11. But al Qaeda has not gone away. In fact, the situation is more complicated than before, as there is not only al Qaeda to contend with but also Islamic State Khorasan, or IS-K, which is small in numbers but has conducted deadly suicide attacks in Afghanistan, including on maternity hospitals and schools, particularly in Kabul.

The current U.S. plan is to contain terrorism from afar, using drones, intelligence networks, and special operations raids launched from bases somewhere in the region . William Burns, the CIA director, admitted that this plan involved “a significant risk.” It was “not the decision we hoped for,” said the British defense chief, Nick Carter.

“These are professional understatements,” William Hague, a former British foreign secretary, wrote recently in response. “Most western security officials I know are horrified.”

Even if the United States’ war is over, Afghanistan’s is not.

Even if the United States’ war is over, Afghanistan’s is not. In the last 15 years, more than 40,000 civilians have been killed. The Afghan government and the Taliban began peace talks in Qatar late last year—but since then, the fighting has intensified, causing even more casualties. When peace talks got underway between the Taliban and the United States in 2019, I asked young Afghans what peace would mean to them. “Being able to go for a picnic,” said one. “Not having to wonder if you will come back again when you leave for work or study,” said another. Most, however, could not answer at all. Fully 70 percent of the Afghan population is under the age of 25, and fighting has gone on since the Soviet invasion in 1979. These Afghans have only ever known war.

Malkasian’s book raises a disturbing question: In the end, did the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan do more harm than good? “The United States exposed Afghans to prolonged harm in order to defend America from another terrorist attack,” he writes. “Villages were destroyed. Families disappeared. . . . The intervention did noble work for women, education, and free speech. But that good has to be weighed against tens of thousands of men, women, and children who died.”

Those “noble” achievements are not negligible, however. There are now 3.5 million Afghan girls in school (although more than two million still do not go). Women are working in all sorts of fields: law enforcement, cinema, robotics. The health-care system has been transformed, and life expectancy for Afghan women has increased by almost ten years. Afghanistan has flourishing media. Even the presence of cell phones indicates a society connected with the rest of the world. Young Afghans will not easily give up these hard-won rights.

The fear is that these gains may now be threatened. Since the peace deal was signed, there have been dozens of assassinations of judges, journalists, and human rights activists, as well as the horrific bombing of a girls’ school. And however U.S. policymakers may seek to dress it up, to the Taliban, the American pullout is a victory. As the oft-quoted Taliban adage goes, “You have all the clocks, but we have all the time.”

The Afghans, after all, never believed that the Americans would stay. Back in 2005, in the remote village of Shkin, a place of intense fighting in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, I watched local villagers happily accept health care and other help from U.S. soldiers in the day, then rocket their base at night. When I asked them why, they had a simple explanation: “In the end, they’ll be gone, and the bad guys will still be here.”

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Despite American presidents and military leaders providing years of positive assessments that the U.S. was winning the war in Afghanistan, behind the scenes there were clear warnings of an unsuccessful end. Those stories of failure, corruption and lack of strategy are the focus of Craig Whitlock's discussion with Judy Woodruff and his new book "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War."

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Judy Woodruff:

Despite American presidents and military leaders providing years of positive assessments that the U.S. was winning the war in Afghanistan, behind the scenes, there were clear warnings that things were headed in another direction.

Those harbingers, stories of failure, corruption and lack of a clear strategy, are the focus of Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock's new book, "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War."

And Craig joins us now.

Thank you so much for being here. Congratulations. This is a definitive book.

Craig Whitlock, you interviewed over 1,000 people and you had access to documents that your newspaper, The Washington Post, had to sue to get. And they tell a very different story in many cases from what the public has been told over the last 20 years, don't they?

Craig Whitlock, The Washington Post:

Yes, these documents were interviews with — the core of them, with more than 400 officials who played a key role in the war.

And this is from White House officials, to generals, diplomats, aid workers, and also Afghans. And they really — they thought these were confidential interviews the government had conducted, and they thought that — their assessments were brutal.

They said that the U.S. government didn't know what it was doing in Afghanistan, it didn't have a strategy, and it misled the American people of how the war was going for 20 years. So, it was a complete opposite of the message that was being delivered in public year after year, that the U.S. was making progress, that victory was around the corner.

And this goes back to the very beginning.

President Bush goes into the U.S. goes into Afghanistan initially to get Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks, but it very quickly changes to nation-building. And you have a lot of behind-the-scenes information from then on about what was going on and how what was being assessed was different from what people were being told.

Craig Whitlock:

Well, and one of earliest examples of this is, President Bush gave a speech in April of 2002 to the Virginia Military Institute.

At that time, the Taliban had been defeated, al-Qaida was on the run. But Bush was addressing concerns already that Afghanistan could turn into a quagmire, like Vietnam, or like what had happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan or the British in the 19th century. And he was dismissing these concerns, saying, don't worry, we won't get bogged down. This isn't going to happen to us.

On that very same day Bush gave the speech, his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, dictated a memo to several of his generals and top aides at the Pentagon. And he said the exact opposite. He expressed his real fear that we could get bogged down. He said, if we don't come up with a plan to stabilize Afghanistan, we will never get the troops out.

And he ended the memo with one word. It said, "Help!" on the very same day.

And that was Donald — the late Donald Rumsfeld.

But you write about a number of instances during the Obama administration, then, of course, into Trump, and just this new administration.

That's right. I mean, this happened with all the presidents.

People may recall, back in 2014, President Obama said that the war was coming to a conclusion. There was actually a ceremony in Kabul at NATO headquarters, in which the U.S. officials said that the combat mission for U.S. troops was over. And yet, behind the scenes, the Pentagon and Obama all knew that U.S. troops were still going to be in harm's way and people were still dying in combat for the duration of the war.

More than 100 people died in Afghanistan, U.S. troops, after Obama said that mission was coming to an end.

And, Craig Whitlock, you cite one military leader after another. I'm thinking of General David Petraeus, who's been out very critical lately of President Biden, saying that he should have realized that the Afghan military was helping fight off ISIS and al-Qaida.

But you cite him and other military leaders telling Congress again, as you're saying now, that things were going well, when they weren't.

That's right.

We heard this month after month, year after year under Bush, Obama and Trump, that the Afghan army and police forces were capable of defending their own country, that they no longer needed U.S. troops to fight the Taliban in ground combat. And yet, in these interviews in "The Afghanistan papers," U.S. military trainers and other officials were sending up highly critical reports of the Afghan forces.

They said they couldn't shoot straight, they were illiterate, their leaders were corrupt. And they expressed real doubt that they could stand up in a fight to the Taliban.

So the Pentagon has known this for many years. And yet, again, as you said, in public, they kept telling the American people that this — everything was going according to plan.

And when people try to understand what went wrong over all these years, I mean, you have got a chapter on corruption. You have got another chapter on the opium trade, the poppies that so many the farmers were growing, and again on the military that — the Afghan military, how hard it was, with change in leadership after change, how hard it was to get the results that Americans were looking for.

And I think most Americans, they knew the war wasn't going well. But they always assumed there was a plan, that there was a strategy that was in place that was maybe just tough to carry out.

But in these interviews in "The Afghanistan Papers," generals, ambassadors, other people, they were very blunt. They said, we didn't know what we were doing in Afghanistan. They literally would say this. We never understood the country. In their early years, there was no strategy.

So it really was worse than people thought.

And what about the role of Pakistan next door? It's been hard for many Americans to understand what that has been really all about, the connection between Pakistan and the Taliban.

And this is something the U.S. government has never really figured out what to do.

It took the Bush administration several years to really come to the realization that the government of Pakistan was — on one hand, it was fighting al-Qaida, but it was lending support secretly to the Taliban. It took them a while to sort of accept that Pakistan was playing a double game.

During the Obama administration, I think they recognized that, but they were really dependent on Pakistan for supply routes to U.S. troops in Afghanistan. So they really couldn't get that tough on the Pakistanis. Same under Trump. There was all this tough talk about getting the Pakistan to clamp down on the Taliban. But we never really had an effective strategy to deal with that.

And when we hear President Biden today saying, among other things, that he really had no choice, that President Trump had negotiated this withdrawal date, and he really couldn't change it, and that the alternative was to escalate, is that the whole story here?

I don't think it's the whole story.

I mean, certainly, President Biden was not obligated to accept Trump's deal with the Taliban. He could have tried to modify it or take a different approach.

But I think he's right in one respect, that this was not a winnable war, and the Taliban had held off on attacking U.S. troops since Trump cut his deal with them in February 2020. So I think he's right.

If we were going to try and have a military victory over the Taliban, which was highly dubious, we would have had to commit more troops and double down on the fighting there. And that was something that Biden didn't want to do.

Can you come away with all this research and reporting you have done, Craig Whitlock, with lessons for future American leaders, when we are tempted to go into another country to fix a problem, to fight an enemy?

Well, and that's right. And the parallels to Vietnam are very strong.

But the irony here is, we don't learn these lessons from history. At the beginning of the war, Bush and Rumsfeld and others, again, they said, we learned our lesson from Vietnam. We're not going to do that again.

So they knew about it, but it still happened. And I think, sometimes, we turn a blind eye to history, and we forget. And we had a lot of hubris in Afghanistan, that we thought we could do something that clearly, in retrospect, failed.

Were there particular truth-tellers who stood out to you in all your research?

I think, in these interviews, which the government tried to keep a secret from the American people, there were truth-tellers.

People admitted that the strategy was a failure and…

After the fact.

After — and not too many. I wish there have been more people that spoke up.

There was one in particular. General David McKiernan was the war commander during the end of Bush's term and the beginning of Obama's. And he was the one general who said in public that the war wasn't going well, that things were going south. He was fired in the Obama administration.

And there was really no concrete reason given, but he the first war commander relief since Douglas MacArthur in Korea. In the documents we obtained, there are military officials who said McKiernan knew that he was getting in trouble for telling the truth about how things weren't going well, and that was the reason.

And, finally, based on what you have learned about the Taliban, what is your expectation about what's going to happen now in Afghanistan?

Well, this is really fascinating.

We fought this war on the assumption that the Taliban was the enemy. Right now, the Taliban, they have gotten everything they wanted to kick out the foreign forces, but they crave diplomatic recognition from the United States. They want humanitarian aid and other assistance to flow in.

I think the Biden administration is going to be slow to recognize a diplomatic — give diplomatic recognition to the Taliban, but they have already started to do business with them militarily. And you may recall that the CIA director, Bill Burns, made a visit to Kabul recently to meet with the Taliban leadership.

So I think, on counterterrorism operations against groups like the Islamic State, I think the U.S. and the Taliban will probably work together fairly closely. They just may keep it hidden from the public.

Which is what so much of the book is about, just a remarkable book, as we say, I — definitive, in my view, "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War."

Craig Whitlock, thank you very much.

Thank you, Judy.

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What the War in Afghanistan Could Never Do

Twenty years ago, Americans sought to feel as strong and invincible as they had the day before the towers fell.

E ven in the context of war, attacking fleeing civilians is a depraved act. The Islamic State’s attack on Kabul’s airport during the American evacuation of Afghanistan, which killed nearly 200 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. service members protecting the facility, was bound to draw a military response. “The Kabul airport massacre compounds the humiliation of the botched Afghan withdrawal and will further embolden jihadists,” The Wall Street Journal editorialized .

Days later, the U.S. executed a drone strike on what it said was an ISIS operation that threatened the final evacuations out of Kabul—a strike General Mark Milley called “righteous.” Several weeks later, General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. apologized, acknowledging that the strike had killed 10 civilians. “I offer my profound condolences to the family and friends of those who were killed,” McKenzie said on September 17 . In early September, Ahmad Fayaz, a relative of one of those killed, told The Washington Post that the U.S. “always says they are killing [the Islamic State], al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but they always attack civilian people and children … I don’t think they are good people.”

The two events were themselves a microcosm of two decades of war, in which the U.S. military responded to a genuine threat with a heavy hand that undermined whatever goodwill it was trying to generate. “When comparing the Taliban with the United States and its Western allies, the vast majority of Afghans have always viewed the Taliban as the lesser of two evils,” the former U.S.-military interpreter Baktash Ahadi wrote in The Washington Post . They were also the first acts of a war that will continue past the Afghanistan withdrawal, a war more modest in objectives, but one in which the U.S. maintains the authority to use lethal force anywhere in the world.

Eliot A. Cohen: A dishonorable exit

The U.S. reliance on airpower has been motivated by an attempt to strike what it believes to be enemy targets while avoiding American casualties. That reliance has also meant that, far more frequently than the U.S. acknowledges, innocent people pay the price for American security concerns. It also provides the opportunity for swift retaliation, not simply to meet military objectives but to stave off what the Journal described as “humiliation.”

The Pentagon’s most recent error involves the inherent difficulties of determining who and where their enemy is. But it’s also a reflection of an American foreign policy preoccupied with “humiliation” and its avoidance. Ironically, it is this very obsession with humiliation that has led the U.S. to wage indefinite wars in pursuit of impossible objectives, employing self-defeating means. The compulsion to win grand, sweeping victories that exemplify American strength and power has prevented realistic judgments about what is achievable. And when politicians prove unable to present their voters with the triumphs that were promised, they choose to lie instead, maintaining the illusion until the wars can be passed on to a successor. At least, until Joe Biden made a different choice.

T he realities of the withdrawal seem to have come as a shock to much of the country. Biden and Donald Trump did not agree on much, but Biden’s decision to honor Trump’s withdrawal deal with the Taliban drew the ire of the defense establishment, whose retired luminaries flocked to broadcast outlets where reporters echoed their criticisms. Afghanistan coverage on cable news in August 2021, Matt Gertz writes , exceeded that of any full year since 2010, when then-President Barack Obama ordered an increase in troops. Trump, for his part, described the exit he himself had negotiated as “the greatest foreign policy humiliation” in American history.

Mike Jason: What we got wrong in Afghanistan

Biden drew harsh and sometimes justified criticism for the withdrawal itself, as the U.S. evacuated more than 100,000 people but, U.S. officials acknowledge, left some Afghan allies and U.S. citizens behind. These legitimate criticisms, though, have become a vehicle for those who planned and administered nearly two decades of stalemate and Taliban revival to cast the withdrawal itself as the debacle, in an effort to hide their own years of failure preceding it. Humiliation, in this case, has many parents, but none wish to claim paternity.

People all over the world were justly horrified by the Taliban’s rapid advance, and what seems like the certain reimposition of a cruel and authoritarian system that will deprive Afghans, women in particular, of their fundamental human rights. Irrespective of its early protestations, the Taliban remains repressive and authoritarian, intent on forcing its austere interpretation of religious law on the Afghan population through brutal means. Unlike the civilian casualties of the past two decades, more recent images of suffering in Afghanistan—crowds chasing planes on the runway, masses of Afghans fleeing the Taliban’s return, the hard faces of Taliban fighters as they grip their firearms—are far more readily accessible to American eyes.

But there is also a detectable undercurrent of imperial narcissism—where the suffering of Afghans is primarily important because of how it makes Americans feel about not being invincible. It is sometimes difficult to discern whether people are afraid for Afghans, or are simply nostalgic for the fantasy that the United States, or the West generally, could remake whole societies through force of arms.

A New York Times analysis—the label denoting opinion pieces by reporters on the news side—offered that the “political danger for Mr. Biden may be that the chaotic exit provides fodder for a broader Republican argument that he is not up to the job and has left the United States humiliated on the world stage.” The NBC News host Chuck Todd argued , “Yes, Americans in both parties supported an end to this 20-year ‘forever war.’ But they also want security, and no one likes to see America humiliated.” Yascha Mounk contended in The Atlantic that Biden would pay for the “scenes of national humiliation now playing on television and social media,” invoking the specter of “humiliation” four times in a single essay.

The right-wing pundit Hugh Hewitt, who supported the withdrawal when Trump supported it and opposed it once Biden began executing it, lamented , “My adult life has included fall of Saigon, Iran hostage crisis, Beirut bombing, KA007, Iran-Contra affair, 9/11, escape of bin Laden, the Iraq WMD and occupation, JCPOA, Putin and Georgia and Ukraine, Hong Kong. This is the worst, not in loss of life, but in deep damage to soul.” Even if the war in Afghanistan could not be won, it seems that Biden was wrong to withdraw because of the damage that has been done to American self-esteem.

As Mounk argues, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aided Trump’s rise by allowing him to portray American leadership as feckless. It does not follow, though, that foreign wars should be pursued indefinitely so that America’s political leadership can continue to feign competence, or that doing so would prevent someone like Trump from exploiting the sense of humiliation that results from the failure of American colonial projects.

In fact, the causality is backwards. As Spencer Ackerman writes , it was precisely two decades of war nationalism and the state of exception they produced that eroded American democracy. Those conditions also set the stage for a racist demagogue whose primary criticism of American wars was that they were incompetently managed because feckless American elites were insufficiently murderous . And yet not even the war-crime enthusiast Trump could slaughter his way to victory in Afghanistan—another national humiliation Trump rushed to ameliorate with an exit toward the end of his term.

T his reaction—the fixation on humiliation above any of the material realities of the mission in Afghanistan—may be difficult to understand for Americans who were not alive on 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of al-Qaeda’s act of mass murder, millions of Americans were seized with a sense of missionary purpose.

“Does anybody but me feel upbeat, and guilty about it?” David Brooks wrote in The Weekly Standard less than a month after the carnage in Manhattan and Washington, D.C. “I feel upbeat because the country seems to be a better place than it was a month ago. I feel guilty about it because I should be feeling pain and horror and anger about the recent events. But there’s so much to cheer one up.”

Read: The Taliban’s return is catastrophic for women

Real American values had been revived by the War on Terror. “To me this whole event has been like a national Sabbath, stripping away the hurly-burly of normal life and reminding people of nation, faith, and ideals,” Brooks wrote. He exulted that even “the most reactionary liberals amongst us are capable of change,” noting that Bruce Springsteen recently had sung a tribute to the NYPD, despite previously having written a song criticizing the killing of Amadou Diallo, who was shot 41 times by police who said they believed he was armed; he had been holding his wallet .

Although the country remained closely divided—George W. Bush’s reelection was  narrow—the years after 9/11 felt to many Americans like a period of conservative cultural and political dominance. During the Obama administration, when Glenn Beck held his “9/12 March,” it was an expression of nostalgia for national unity on right-wing terms. The sense of purpose and unity was also attractive to liberal hawks, who were drawn to the sense of national mission and the opportunity to marginalize radicals who embarrassed them and, in their view, weakened the Democratic Party’s political fortunes .

A few years earlier, Brooks had written about the need for a “National Greatness Conservatism,” calling for Americans to embrace a new “national mission” along the lines of “settling the West, building the highway system, creating the post-war science faculties, exploring space, waging the Cold War, and disseminating American culture throughout the world.” In other corners of the right, this neoconservative idealism took on a darker cast.

Writing in The Atlantic , Christopher Hitchens sneered that left-wing war skeptics were “the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.” Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan, he announced in The Nation that “the United States of America has just succeeded in bombing a country back out of the Stone Age.” In National Review in 2002, during the run-up to the Iraq War, Jonah Goldberg approvingly quoted his colleague Michael Ledeen, who said that “every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” That the people who live in those countries might object, or might have the capacity to resist such arbitrary demonstrations of American power, was an afterthought.

After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration undertook the task of remaking the world in America’s image, at gunpoint. The War on Terror was the New Cold War, the New New Deal. To express skepticism about this national mission—not even opposition, but merely skepticism—was to side with the terrorists, to be the kind of person who would not lift a finger to save their own child. It was to abandon America, and Americans.

As a national mission, this crusade was far less successful than the New Deal, or even the Cold War. The New Deal expanded the American welfare state and empowered workers against their bosses. The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Two decades and four administrations later, the War on Terror finds jihadist groups arguably more widespread, dangerous, and influential than they were prior to 9/11.

The roots of its failure are not simply conceptual but lie in the zeal that could not suffer scrutiny or recognize error. Al-Qaeda had not only murdered thousands of people here at home, but questioned American resolve and American strength. Simply protecting the country, defeating those responsible on the battlefield, or even destroying al-Qaeda’s leadership would not be enough.

American leaders sought to purge the fear and humiliation many felt with violence, by turning Afghanistan into a utopia where groups like al-Qaeda could not exist. “Our War on Terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there,” Bush told Congress and the nation nine days after the attacks. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” America’s new purpose, he said, was to “answer these attacks and rid the world of evildoers.”

A cting on that impulse , the Bush administration was not satisfied with simply defeating the Taliban in 2001. It drew up plans to invade Iraq in order to continue the glorious national mission, but it also sowed the seeds in Afghanistan for the Taliban’s revival. “From the very beginning, the U.S. had the idea that there’s only unconditional surrender; there was no surrender with amnesty,” the former New Yorker correspondent Anand Gopal told MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem . “You had a one-sided war in those years, between 2001 and 2004, where the U.S. was fighting an enemy that didn’t exist, and innocent people were the ones who were suffering. That really is what created the Taliban’s resurgence.”

Even if you believe Gopal’s description is oversimplified—the Taliban was still launching cross-border attacks from Pakistan in those years—there’s a great deal of evidence for the argument that American policy strengthened the Taliban after its initial defeat.

A comprehensive report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) shows that the operation was a failure almost from the beginning, an attempt to impose America’s will on a nation whose economic, cultural, and political dynamics American leadership never respected or understood. Although the most crucial mistakes were likely made during the Bush administration , devastating errors were made across four administrations, both Democratic and Republican.

Tom Nichols: Afghanistan is your fault

The U.S. attempt to revive the Afghan economy with foreign aid created a weak state dependent on outside support, but failed to reduce unemployment or poverty. Reconstruction projects were unused, abandoned, or destroyed. The cash infusion, combined with corruption, “created new grievances and exacerbated old ones, as some groups benefited from the war and others were alienated and driven toward the insurgency,” the SIGAR report said; the winners “committed major crimes with impunity, creating a kind of mafia rule.” U.S. projects “unwittingly supported one powerbroker or interest group at the expense of another, thereby stoking local conflicts and creating an opportunity for insurgents to form an alliance with the disaffected party.” American leaders relied on “strongmen and warlords to build a nascent bureaucracy,” an approach that undermined the Afghan government’s legitimacy rather than establishing it. In a classic example of bureaucratic failure, “evaluations intentionally obfuscated the truth,” because no one wanted to lose funding or support for their assignment.

In one telling anecdote from 2009, according to SIGAR, General Stanley A. McChrystal ordered the construction of two large diesel generators to provide electricity to 650,000 Kandahar residents, believing that “expanding access to electricity would improve the Afghan government’s legitimacy.” But the fuel costs proved too high to sustain, and the “resulting widespread power outages exposed the project as a bridge to nowhere.” The reporter Azmat Kahn wrote in 2015 that despite American claims, more than 1,000 U.S.-built schools in Afghanistan had been abandoned but were still being funded, with cash ending up “in the pockets of brutal warlords and reviled strongmen, which sometimes soured the local population on the U.S. and the Afghan government.” The Afghan army would collapse 12 years later in the face of the Taliban advance, when deprived of U.S. military and contractor support. Everything the U.S. built in Afghanistan was a sandcastle.

As the Afghan government foundered, commentators ignored these fatal flaws, indulging the fantasy that the war might have been successful if the military had simply killed more of the enemy. The Soviet Union pursued its invasion of Afghanistan with unrestrained brutality —that didn’t work, either. According to Craig Whitlock’s 2021 book, The Afghanistan Papers , by 2018 the Taliban had “swollen to about 60,000 fighters, up from 25,000 seven years earlier,” and had gained so much territory that the U.S. “stopped tracking territorial control altogether.” By July 2018, the U.S. estimated that the Taliban controlled or contested half of Afghanistan . This happened despite the Trump administration removing Obama-era restraints on air strikes.

Few asked why, if the American presence was so unconditionally benevolent, the Taliban managed to rise from the ashes of its early defeat. A farmer south of Kabul told the journalist Emran Feroz last year that he hoped the peace talks would be successful, because “​we can live in poverty but not without peace.”

T his backlash to the failure of the national mission undertaken after 9/11 explains why American leaders lied to the public for so long about the progress of the war. No president wanted to be the president who lost Afghanistan, and no general wanted to be the general who brought American forces home from a defeat. “For those millions of Americans who demanded vengeance for 9/11, and then for the United States’ compounded misfortunes in seeking it, the Forever War brought only the pain and humiliation of attaining neither peace nor victory,” Spencer Ackerman writes. So the war continued. It fell to Biden to deliver the bad news.

No one has made a compelling or coherent case for how the U.S. could actually have succeeded in Afghanistan after 20 years of failure. We have instead been treated to nonsense arguments that low American casualties during talks with the Taliban was the new normal, and that the risk for an American service member during a deployment to Afghanistan was comparable to being stationed in South Korea. But there are also no improvised explosive devices in Seoul, and soldiers don’t get to take their families with them to Kandahar. Afghanistan was not an easy assignment like being stationed in Berlin, where you get a housing allowance that will easily pay for a luxury apartment if you are not assigned on-base housing.

This argument elides the steep casualty rate of the Afghan army, and the inevitability that American force would eventually be needed to repel the Taliban advance, which would mean more American casualties. The only alternative to withdrawal was a resumption and escalation of the war the leaders of the U.S. government have quietly known for years was not winnable.

Last week, General Mark Milley testified that contrary to Biden’s public assertions , he advised the president to maintain a residual force in Afghanistan. But he also acknowledged that the U.S.-backed Afghan government could never have survived on its own , testifying, “the end state probably would have been the same no matter when you did it.”

Few American leaders—except for those with relatives in Afghanistan—and few American families, except for those whose loved ones deployed over and over to fight a battle their leaders knew they could not win, were concerned about the fate of Afghanistan until Biden injured their pride by withdrawing. Then, people unwilling to wear a mask inside or get vaccinated to protect others from a disease killing 1,000 Americans a week were suddenly seized with an eagerness to send other people’s fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters back to an unwinnable war so they could avert the shame of defeat, the realization that the national mission to forever purge the trauma of 9/11 through military might could not succeed.

Americans grow up being taught that America is invincible; the most popular film franchise of the current moment is a 12-year monument to commercial filmmaking in which a blue-eyed World War II veteran clad in an American flag leads a posse of demigods back through time to undo an allegorical representation of 9/11. Ardent nationalists are unused to accepting trade-offs or limitations on American power, and many prefer leaders who will paper over such trade-offs with belligerent fictions about American omnipotence.

Whether it is anger over the thought of impoverished Taliban fighters outlasting the world’s most expensive and powerful military or fears over the fate of those left under Taliban rule, the lives of Afghans are but chipped tiles in the mosaic of American nationalism. There was little public anguish in the United States over the Trump administration quietly increasing civilian casualties more than 300 percent from 2017 to 2020 by relaxing rules governing air strikes, because those deaths were not understood to illustrate the limits of American power. But when Americans suffered the sting of defeat in a war they had not spent five minutes thinking about over the previous five years, then, and only then, did Afghan lives start to matter to them.

But only to a point. In an echo of the Obama era’s aggressive deportation efforts, the Biden administration has proved exceedingly frightened of the backlash from reversing Trump-era immigration policies, keeping most of them in place without placating a single one of its critics. Soon after the evacuation began, ambitious conservative politicians and media figures began warning of an “invasion” of Afghan refugees. Trump released a statement accusing the Afghans scrambling to flee Taliban rule of being potential terrorists, and weeks later, Republicans in the Senate voted unanimously to block assistance to them. In fact, Afghans are fleeing an American failure, and America should open its doors to them. This nation’s history of providing shelter to people from all over the world is far more consistent than its record of military victory.

In 1869, Frederick Douglass anticipated the growing wave of nativism in the United States by arguing , “In whatever else other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds, and to men of no creeds.” America’s mission, he argued, was to become the “perfect national illustration of the unit and dignity of the human family, that the world has ever seen.” If America wants to be great, there are other national missions besides war.

Those who opposed withdrawal cannot plausibly argue that the U.S. military was close to completing its mission, or that another 20 years would have made a difference. But they can use Americans’ wounded pride, and the echo of the sadness and despair they felt on 9/11, to raise the costs for Joe Biden of delivering the bad news. The preoccupation with American “humiliation” in Afghanistan is a form of mourning for something the invasion was never able to do—make Americans feel as strong and invincible as they did the day before the towers fell.

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The fate of women’s rights in Afghanistan

This piece is part of 19A: The Brookings Gender Equality Series . In this essay series, Brookings scholars, public officials, and other subject-area experts examine the current state of gender equality 100 years after the 19th Amendment was adopted to the U.S. Constitution and propose recommendations to cull the prevalence of gender-based discrimination in the United States and around the world.

As the United States reduces its military presence in Afghanistan while the Taliban remain strong on the battlefield, and while peace negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban have commenced, a massive question mark hangs over the fate of Afghan women and their rights. The deal that the United States signed with the Taliban in Doha on February 29, 2020, leaves the future of Afghan women completely up to the outcomes of the intra-Taliban negotiations and battlefield developments. In exchange for the withdrawal of its forces by summer 2021, the United States only received assurances from the Taliban that the militants would not attack U.S. and its allies’ targets, conduct terrorist attacks against U.S. and allies’ assets, or allow the territory under Taliban control to be used for such terrorist attacks. How Afghanistan and its political order is redesigned is left fully up to the negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government and other Afghan politicians, powerbrokers, and—hopefully—representatives of Afghan civil society. But there are strong reasons to be believe that the fate of Afghan women, particularly urban Afghan women from middle- and upper-class families who benefited by far the most from the post-2001 order, will worsen. The United States’ leverage to preserve at least some of their rights and privileges is limited and diminishing. But it is hardly zero. And so the U.S. must exercise whatever leverage it has remaining to preserve the rights and protect the needs of Afghan women.

The expected negotiations and the state of the battlefield

Long gone are the days when the George W. Bush administration embraced women’s rights and empowerment of women as a justification for its war on the Taliban. Long gone are the days of the Barack Obama administration when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the preconditions for U.S. negotiations with the Taliban included the Taliban’s renunciation of al-Qaida and their commitment to uphold the Afghan constitution and protect women’s rights. Less than ten years later, the renunciation of al-Qaida has yet to be explicitly and publicly made; the constitutional order and women’s rights are still subject to intra-Afghan negotiations and will be affected by the evolving balance of military power.

And, amidst COVID-19, violence on the battlefield has only intensified as the Taliban relentlessly and steadily pound Afghan forces.

Though originally expected for March, formal negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban finally started in September. The Afghan government has appointed a 21-member negotiating team that includes five Afghan women. Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, also established the High Council for National Reconciliation, a higher supervisory body to monitor and direct the negotiating team. Out of 46 appointed members only nine are women , while former warlords and older male powerbrokers dominate the list. Although the list continues to be contested between the factions of President Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah—his chief political rival and the head of the High Council—Afghan commentators interpreted it widely as marginalizing Afghan women and only giving them representation “in reserved seats,” and “reflecting a 2001 Afghanistan power structure” exclusively dominated by warlords and tribal elders.

But the Taliban’s negotiating team contains no women at all. Both Western observers and Afghan civil society representatives have repeatedly highlighted the absence of women’s representation in the Taliban’s governing structures, political offices, and the negotiating team— and raised the issue with the Taliban. 1 But the Taliban have remained rigid and unresponsive to suggestions it include women in at least some of its governing and political bodies and particularly its negotiating team—a position that reflects the Taliban’s continual marginalization of women.

The women appointed to the two government bodies are urban, educated women, some of whom held government positions and others who are members of civil society. They are to represent all Afghan women. These women have consistently spoken out against Taliban abuses and strongly oppose any return to political arrangements that would significantly weaken the rights of Afghan women. Afghans expect them to oppose constitutional and social changes that would significantly reduce the formal rights that Afghan women obtained over the past two decades. However, at least some rural Afghan women do not feel connected to such elite urban women nor do they believe that urban elite women necessarily speak for them. The preferences of these rural women lean much more heavily toward a desire for peace even if it means sacrificing some formal women’s rights that they are currently unable to exercise anyway, as detailed below. 2

Moreover, will these women representatives carry sufficient weight? The current Afghan government is committed to women’s rights, although it is able to enforce the rights for only a small segment of Afghan women and only sporadically—principally for urban women whom male relatives allow to access education and jobs. And, as indicated above, there are limits to how much the government is able to challenge Afghanistan’s power structures.

Nonetheless, the Afghan government, strongly displeased with the deal the United States signed with the Taliban and dreading the prospect of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, continually uses the issue of women’s rights as a tool to persuade the United States not to withdraw its forces even after the May 2021 deadline set by the Doha agreement. Meanwhile, the Afghan government continually seeks to delay and avoid negotiations with the Taliban, hoping that the United States will reverse itself and agree to either retain forces in Afghanistan for years to come or, ideally, deploy them to fight the Taliban.

But whether these hopes of the Afghan government materialize—and even if they do—whether they translate into actual empowerment of Afghan women is a huge question. Whether Afghan representatives on the negotiations team can force the Taliban not to weaken women’s rights and existing behavioral practices and socio-economic opportunities of middle and upper-class urban Afghan women will principally depend on what happens on the battlefield. It will also depend on how long negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban drag onand how badly weakened the Afghan security forces and the Afghan government become. Whether or not the Afghan political system implodes into factional violence and coups d’etat before that are also crucial factors. Moreover, informally, the Taliban continuously bypass the government’s negotiating team by engaging with Afghan powerbrokers—all men—as they seek to strike separate behind-the-scenes deals, including potentially a joint interim government. At least some Afghan powerbrokers are open to such explorations. If the Taliban manage to strike separate deals with key Afghan powerbrokers before the government manages to get any negotiations with the Taliban going, the representation of women’s voices and interests will be marginalized further.

In short, the issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan faces highly uncertain prospects, and most likely women’s rights will deteriorate.

How life has improved for Afghan women over the past two decades and how it has not

Many Afghan women, particularly those in urban areas, have much to lose from a bad intra-Afghan deal. During the 1990s, the Taliban not only brutally imposed social restrictions on women such as mandatory burqa coverings, but, more fundamentally and deleteriously, restricted their access to health care, education, and jobs. It prohibited women from appearing in public spaces without a male chaperon, de facto sentencing widows and their children to starvation. The Taliban regime destroyed Afghan institutions and the economy, which was already devastated by decades of fighting and the Soviet scorched-earth counterinsurgency strategy. The resulting immiseration critically affected women and children. And, with the exception of poppy cultivation and opium harvesting , the Taliban prohibited women from holding jobs, including working as doctors for other women.

The post-Taliban constitution in 2004 gave Afghan women all kinds of rights, and the post-Taliban political dispensation brought social and economic growth that significantly improved their socio-economic condition. From a collapsed health care system with essentially no medical services available to women during the Taliban years, the post-Taliban regime constructed 3,135 functional health facilities by 2018, giving 87 percent of Afghan people access to a medical facility within two hours distance—at least in theory, because intensifying Taliban, militia, and criminal violence has made travel on roads increasingly unsafe. 3

In 2003, fewer than 10 percent of girls were enrolled in primary schools; by 2017, that number had grown to 33 percent 4 —not enough, but progress still—while female enrollment in secondary education grew from six percent in 2003 to 39 percent in 2017. 5 Thus, 3.5 million Afghan girls were in school with 100,000 studying in universities.

Women’s life expectancy grew from 56 years in 2001 to 66 in 2017, 6 and their mortality during childbirth declined from 1,100 per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 396 per 100,000 in 2015. 7

By 2020, 21 percent of Afghan civil servants were women (compared with almost none during the Taliban years), 16 percent of them in senior management levels; and 27 percent of Afghan members of parliament were women. 8

Instead of economic, social, and political empowerment, Afghan women in rural areas—where an estimated 76 percent of the country’s women live—experience the devastation of bloody and intensifying fighting between the Taliban and government forces and local militias.

Yet these gains for women have been distributed highly unequally, with the increases far greater for women in urban areas. For many rural women, particularly in Pashtun areas but also among other rural minority ethnic groups, actual life has not changed much from the Taliban era, formal legal empowerment notwithstanding. They are still fully dependent on men in their families for permission to access health care, attend school, and work. Many Afghan men remain deeply conservative. Typically, families allow their girls to have a primary or secondary education—usually up to puberty—and then will proceed with arranged marriages. Even if a young woman is granted permission to attend a university by her male guardian, her father or future husband may not permit her to work after graduation. Without any prodding from the Taliban, most Afghan women in rural areas are fully covered with the burqa.

 Instead of economic, social, and political empowerment, Afghan women in rural areas—where an estimated 76 percent of the country’s women live —experience the devastation of bloody and intensifying fighting between the Taliban and government forces and local militias. Loss of husbands, brothers, and fathers to the fighting generates not only psychological trauma for them, but also fundamentally jeopardizes their economic survival and ability to go about everyday life. Widows and their children are thus highly vulnerable to a panoply of debilitating disruptions due to the loss of family men.

 Not surprisingly, the position of Afghan women toward peace varies greatly. Educated urban women reject the possibility of another Taliban emirate. They dream of a peace deal in which the Taliban are a weak actor in the negotiations and is given some political and perhaps government representation, but not the ability to shape the rewrite of the Afghan constitution and the country’s basic political dispensation. Rather than yielding to the Taliban, some urban women may prefer for fighting to go on, particularly as urban areas are much less affected by the warfare than are rural areas, and their male relatives, particularly of elite families, rarely bear the battlefield fighting risks. For them, the continuation and augmentation of war has been far less costly than for many rural women.

By contrast, as interviews with Afghan women conducted by one of us in the fall of 2019 and the summer of 2020 showed, peace is an absolute priority for some rural women, even a peace deal very much on the Taliban terms. 9 This finding was confirmed in a recent International Crisis Group report . The Taliban already frequently rule or influence the areas where they live anyway. While rejecting a 1990s-like lockdown of women in their homes that the Taliban imposed, many rural women point out that in that period the Taliban also reduced sexual predation and robberies that debilitated their lives.

But the issue of women’s rights is a highly contested and charged political debate among Afghan women themselves beyond the rural-urban and Taliban-non-Taliban divides. A recent study by UN Women and partners showed that only 15 percent of Afghan men think women should be allowed to work outside of their home after marriage, and two thirds of men complain Afghan women now have too many rights. Male Afghan political powerbrokers often resent quotas for women in public shuras (assemblies) and elections such as for parliament, where 27 percent of seats are reserved for women. Women representatives feel systematically marginalized, ignored, patronized, and harassed, with men trying to order them “back to the kitchen.”

The UN study also revealed that 80 percent of Afghan women experience domestic violence. Some 50 percent of women in Afghan prisons and 95 percent of such girls have been jailed for “moral crimes” such as having sex outside of marriage. Others have been prosecuted for killing their brutally abusive husbands , including in self-defense. Distressingly, not only the Taliban but important segments of Afghan society appear to be growing more conservative , embracing doctrinaire versions of sharia that call for reducing women’s rights and freedoms.

What the Taliban say about women’s rights now

How much Afghan women’s rights deteriorate or (highly unlikely) improve depends on whether Afghanistan’s current civil war significantly intensifies and how weak or strong a deal the Afghan government is able to negotiate with the Taliban. Currently, there is no realistic prospect of the Afghan government defeating the Taliban. There is also little reason to believe that even an open-ended American military commitment to Afghanistan, including a new significant increase in U.S. forces, can significantly weaken the Taliban, let alone defeat them. If a prolonged and bloody civil war can be avoided through negotiations, the Taliban will most likely become a significant actor in the Afghan government. It is conceivable that the Taliban could become the dominant and most powerful actor in a future Afghan government.

The Taliban already rule significant parts of the country — indeed much of the countryside—and determine, sometimes in negotiations with local communities, what local life is like, including what freedoms women have or do not have. Thus, the Taliban inevitably will shape in significant ways the rights and existence of Afghan women.

Distressingly, not only the Taliban but important segments of Afghan society appear to be growing more conservative, embracing doctrinaire versions of sharia that call for reducing women’s rights and freedoms.

Various Taliban and Taliban-linked interlocutors interviewed by one of this article’s authors in the fall of 2019 claim that they do not want a return to the 1990s, with its economic collapse, or want to adopt the very brutal treatment of women which then prevailed. 10 Their firmly stated position is that the Taliban protect and will protect women’s rights under sharia—a rubric, however, that can cover a range of policies and behavior. Almost always, it means mandated codes of dress and behavior. However, some versions of sharia, such as in Saudi Arabia, can drastically subordinate a woman’s life to decisions of her male guardian. In other versions, such as in parts of Indonesia, the interpretations of sharia can be far more permissive and thus maintain women’s abilities to access education and, crucially, employment. Often, sharia systems compete with formal legal systems within a country, even as the latter can also be informed by sharia. In some countries, such as Pakistan and Somalia , sharia courts often protect women’s property rights far better than formal judiciary systems or informal traditional systems, but still subject them to many severe restrictions and even brutal physical punishments such as beatings and stoning to death for adultery and being raped. By stating that they will “protect” women’s rights under sharia, but otherwise refusing to specify how women’s rights and life in Afghanistan would change if they attain their preferences, the Taliban give themselves a wide berth of options. Very likely, however, the Taliban’s inclinations will be to weaken women’s rights, further tighten cultural restrictions on women, and shrink socio-economic opportunities for them, even if the Taliban in government did not formally embrace as brutal a system for women as in the 1990s.            

Some of the Taliban interlocutors suggested during the fall of 2019 interviews 11 that in a future Afghanistan, with the Taliban in control or sharing power (as they imagine will be the outcome), women could still hold ministerial positions, though a woman could never be the head of state or government. Others pointed to Saudi Arabia as an example of a system they would apply to women’s rights and social order. 12 The lack of specificity and the varied Taliban positions reflect two dynamics. First, many Taliban tell their interlocutors what they want to hear—giving different messages to Western diplomats, journalists, and researchers; Afghan powerbrokers or Afghan society in general; and their rank and file. Second, there may well be little agreement among members of Taliban leadership shuras , and between them and mid-level military commanders, as to what any kind of peace should look like regarding a variety of social and political arrangements, including the roles, freedoms, and restrictions on women. Thus, Taliban leaders and spokesmen prefer to leave crucial elements vague, hoping first that they will be able to negotiate power division in the country, ideally becoming the dominant government actor, and only then worry about the details of social and political rules.

On the ground today, Taliban rule varies significantly among local Taliban military commanders and shadow district governors and their views. In some places, it includes the same old brutalities, such as whipping women for sex outside of marriage, stoning them to death for certain offenses, and punishment for not wearing a burqa. Elsewhere, the Taliban are more permissive. As fieldwork by one of the authors shows, even in Afghanistan’s north where non-Pashtun ethnic groups dominate and in some cases adopt less restrictive social mores, such as in Badakhshan, the Taliban restrict music and soap operas, but tell the local population such restrictions are only temporary—until they come to power formally as the official, and not merely shadow, government. But a loosening of restrictions may not, in fact, arrive should formal Taliban rule emerge at the national level; rather, the opposite is likely. The Taliban may be trying simply to obfuscate their restrictive inclinations while strengthening their hold on local communities. Elsewhere yet, older males in some communities often approach the Taliban and demand from them that the Taliban enforce traditional social mores, including severe restrictions on women’s rights.

At the same time, the Taliban have moderated their behavior after defeating the uprisings against their rule that started in the city of Ghazni in 2012 and for two years spread across the country. The Taliban smashed the uprisings, keenly prioritizing a military pushback against them and often killing all males in villages involved in the anti-Taliban fight. But since crushing the uprisings, the Taliban have stopped shutting down primary schools in many areas, including in Ghazni and Helmand Provinces. They now allow, at least, pre-pubescent girls to attend school. Rather than shutting down the schools, they send representatives to ensure schools do not teach anything the Taliban disapprove of. Clearly, censorship of education is most problematic, but having some education—even if it is merely basic literacy and numeracy in addition to Koranic instruction—is preferable to no education at all. Moreover, Taliban representatives also make sure that teachers actually show up in classrooms instead of tending to other jobs, as they often do in government-controlled or militarily-contested areas. In many areas, the Taliban no longer prohibit government clinics, electricity delivery, and other government services—it taxes them instead. This also guarantees that resources are not stolen via corruption and theft and punishes clinic operators for not having adequate supplies of medicines. 13

How the Taliban relate to women in an area is often negotiated with the community. And, like many other jihadi groups , the Taliban deliver swift and non-corrupt sharia justice that often guarantees inheritance-property rights to women—unlike in Afghanistan’s formal justice system that remains mired in endless delays, paralysis, and corruption. Indeed, for one of us who commanded U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, it was only here, in the administration of swift, un-corrupt justice, where the Taliban could compete with the Afghan government. The Taliban could not provide fresh water or electricity or any civil services, but the Taliban could provide near-instantaneous sharia-based justice that sometimes served the best interests of both Afghan women and men and ended disputes and violence.

In short, even with this moderation in behavior, it is very likely that the Taliban in power will seek to restrict the formal rights that Afghan women have today, worsening these women’s social, economic, and political conditions. The question is, how much and in what ways?

What the United States and the international community can do to promote women’s rights in Afghanistan

Even while the United States withdraws its forces from Afghanistan, it should maintain a strong policy focus on women’s rights in the country, just as it did during the period of the NATO International Security Assistance Force. Such a focus is not merely a humanitarian imperative. Women’s empowerment continues to serve U.S. primary interests in the country because women are vectors of both peace and economic progress in Afghanistan. The United States should seek to influence intra-Taliban negotiations, to preserve maximum freedom and human rights protection of Afghan women that Afghan society is prepared to accept by insisting to the Taliban and Afghan powerbrokers that women’s rights are crucial qualifications for U.S. and international aid. An exodus of Afghan women from the country or their lockup in family compounds will only augment the stagnation and violence dynamics in the country.

The United States should set minimal standards of women’s rights below which it would refuse to provide economic aid to an Afghan government (whether including or run by the Taliban). For example, the United States can insist that statutorily denying women access to health care and primary and secondary education, prohibiting women from appearing outside of a household without a male relative, or in a blanket manner disqualifying women from jobs would disqualify an Afghan government from U.S. aid. The United States should also make clear that even in the absence of statutory prohibitions, a systematic failure to uphold minimal rights would disqualify Afghanistan or a part of it from the majority of U.S. economic and humanitarian assistance. The United States should also insist that those who violate the basic rights of Afghan women as they are defined by the Afghan constitution, or as set by minimal international human right standards, such as by committing murder, lynching, and grievous domestic violence against women, are brought to justice, prosecuted, and imprisoned.

Even as it draws down its military presence, the United States—and its allies in Afghanistan—is not powerless. The U.S. retains other leverage with the Taliban—including maintaining economic aid to the country. For that reason as well, the Taliban are keenly aware they need to cater—at least to some extent—not only to the preferences of the Afghan population, but also to the United States. Taliban interlocutors consistently indicate that they do not want a loss of U.S. economic aid after a U.S. military withdrawal when, as they believe, the Taliban will be in power in some form. Maintaining the above-highlighted conditionality on economic aid that does not jeopardize basic humanitarian objectives, such as in the COVID-19 pandemic, but shapes the Taliban’s behavior for the better, will likely be a crucial and perhaps potent tool.

The United States should also facilitate the travel of some Taliban leaders to other countries, particularly Islamic countries where women enjoy significant freedoms, to expose the Taliban to how women’s rights can be consistent with sharia and what laws and governance systems would increase the chance that U.S. and western aid is preserved for an Afghan government of which the Taliban is part. Countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, and Turkey come to mind.

Importantly, the United States and the international community should preserve economic and political support for defenders of women’s rights in Afghanistan. That includes providing them with asylum visas if they become targets of violent retaliation—whether by the Taliban, government-associated powerbrokers, or male relatives. Many Afghan NGOs have seen a dramatic collapse of western funding over the past several years. Those drops should be reversed. Maintaining support for NGOs that focus on women in rural areas—whether by providing shelters where battered women can live, delivering medical aid, or teaching basic job skills—is crucial.

While the intra-Afghan peace process will grapple with matters such as levels of violence, detainee release, and local, regional, and national power sharing, such power restructuring will not necessarily get to the central issue of the future of half the Afghan population: the women of Afghanistan, who by Afghan adage “hold up half the sky.” Only a determined, long-term process of securing the rights and hopes of Afghan women and holding the Taliban and others in Afghanistan accountable for them will guarantee a future that allows the country to prosper and includes access to credible membership in the community of nations. Otherwise, Afghanistan will forfeit the gains achieved at such a high price by so many, and the women of Afghanistan will endure and labor again under the dark sky of brutal rule, a darkness enshrouding all of the country and casting a shadow of shame on the international community.

• Vanda Felbab-Brown’s interviews with Taliban-linked interlocutors, Western diplomats who negotiated with the Taliban, and Afghan politicians and civil society members who negotiated with the Taliban, Kabul, October 2019 and by phone, January 2020, February 2020, and July 2020.
• Vanda Felbab-Brown’s interviews with several rural Afghan women and Afghan representatives of Afghan women’s NGOs, Baddakhshan, Helmand, and Ghazni, October 2019.
• World Health Organization, WHO Afghanistan Country Office 2019 Report, February 2019, p. 23, http://www.emro.who.int/images/stories/afghanistan/WHO_at_a_Glance_2019_Feb.pdf?ua=1
• The World Bank , Afghanistan’s Developmental Gains: Progress and Challenges , Jan. 2020, p. 7, https://doi-org.brookings.idm.oclc.org/10.1596/33209
•  The World Bank , Afghanistan’s Developmental Gains: Progress and Challenges , Jan. 2020, p. 7, https://doi-org.brookings.idm.oclc.org/10.1596/33209
• The World Bank, Life Expectancy at Birth, Female (Years) – Afghanistan, accessed: March 17, 2020, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.FE.IN?end=2017&locations=AF&most_recent_value_desc=true&start=2001
• The World Bank, Progress in the Face of Insecurity: Improving Health Outcomes, March 6, 2018, p. 7, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/330491520002103598/pdf/123809-WP-PUBLIC-MARCH6-530AM-14846-WB-Afghanistan-Policy-Brief-WEB.pdf
• The World Bank , Afghanistan’s Developmental Gains: Progress and Challenges , Jan. 2020, p. 12, https://doi-org.brookings.idm.oclc.org/10.1596/33209
• Vanda Felbab-Brown’s interviews with Afghan women in rural and urban areas of Afghanistan Taliban, in person or by phone, Herat, Kandahar, Helmand, Nangarhar, Badakhshan and Kabul, October and November 2019 and summer 2020.
• Vanda Felbab-Brown’s interviews with Taliban representatives, spokesmen, and members of the Taliban, in person or by phone, Badakhshan and Kabul, October and November 2019.
• Vanda Felbab-Brown conducted over 100 interviews with a wide set of Afghan interlocutors, including urban and rural women, government officials, military and intelligence officers, members of militias, powerbrokers, members of the religious clergy, and the Taliban to learn how nonstate armed actors govern in the parts of Afghanistan they control and what kind of vision of Afghanistan’s future the Taliban has, how it wants to govern if it comes to power at the national level, and what compromises the current Afghan government and powerbrokers are prepared to make to reach a peace deal with the Taliban.
•  Vanda Felbab-Brown’s interviews with Taliban representatives, spokesmen, and members of the Taliban, in person or by phone, Badakhshan and Kabul, October and November 2019.
• Vanda Felbab-Brown’s interviews with Afghan women, civil society representatives, journalists, and local government officials, Kabul, Badakhshan, and Herat, and by phone Helmand, Kandahar, and Nangarhar, October 2019. See also, Ashley Jackson, “Life under the Taliban Shadow Government,” Overseas Development Institute, June 2018, https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/resource-documents/12269.pdf .

This piece is part of 19A: The Brookings Gender Equality Series.  Learn more about the series and read published work »

The research reported here was funded in part by the Minerva Research Initiative (OUSD(R&E)) and the Army Research Office/Army Research Laboratory via grant #W911-NF-17-1-0569 to George Mason University.  Any errors and opinions are not those of the Department of Defense and are attributable solely to the author(s).

About the Authors

John r. allen, president, the brookings institution, vanda felbab-brown, senior fellow – foreign policy, center for 21st century security and intelligence, more from allen and felbab-brown, around the halls: brookings experts discuss the implications of the us-taliban agreement.

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Guest Essay

I Was a Marine in Afghanistan. We Sacrificed Lives for a Lie.

By Timothy Kudo

Mr. Kudo, a former Marine captain who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, is working on a novel about the Afghanistan war.

The Afghan cities fall in rapid succession, like men caught in enfilade fire. First Zaranj , Kunduz a few days later, then Kandahar and Lashkar Gah. Next is Mazar-i-Sharif. And finally, the Taliban begin their move to swiftly and decisively take Kabul.

I watch this news, and at first I feel nothing. But at night I return once more to Afghanistan. There is a nightmare: The enemy and I are in each other’s sights. Who will shoot first? I squeeze, but the trigger freezes. The Taliban fighter’s finger curls. I wake. I have had this dream for 10 years, ever since returning from Afghanistan, but now it feels as though it has become real.

Decades of war are dissolved in weeks. The Taliban advance with a speed that reminds me of the American conquest of Baghdad. There are other similarities: Taliban troops enter the gilded compounds of our corrupt Afghan allies and marvel at the evidence of years of American aid stolen by their former government leaders.

During the day my thoughts become preoccupied by the past. I hear a squad on the other end of the radio pinned down, a report about a Marine hit, the crack of fear in the sergeant’s voice, clock ticking as the blood pours from the 19-year-old’s neck; we race to send the helicopter that will arrive too late.

I see a report that the American Embassy will destroy its American flags to deny the Taliban a propaganda victory. I think of the star-spangled banner that flew over my old patrol base, called Habib, Arabic for “beloved.” Five men died under that flag, for what?

The hawks still circle and screech. The voices from the past 20 years who prodded us forward into battle return to the evening news to sell us on staying. “It’s not too late,” the former generals, secretaries and ambassadors say. “More troops can hold the line. Victory is just around the corner.”

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