An Abrupt and Tragic End to the 'Forever War' in Afghanistan

The final throes of the United States’ 20-year military engagement in Afghanistan guarantee that the war many Americans would have preferred to forget will instead be seared into the country’s collective memory with the same permanence as the disastrous fall of Saigon in 1975.

Promised a “secure and orderly” withdrawal of U.S. troops and personnel by President Joe Biden as recently as July, what Americans got was chaos, as the insurgent Taliban — deposed by the U.S. in 2001 — rolled up city after city in the space of little more than a week, finally entering Kabul unopposed on August 15. As American diplomats burned sensitive documents and destroyed equipment in the embassy, U.S. troops were rushed back into the country to try to establish a modicum of control over the airport, where mobs of Afghan civilians surged onto the tarmac, desperate for a seat on a flight out of the country. At least seven people died, some falling to their deaths after clinging to the outside of a departing U.S. military transport plane. Throughout last weekend, the Biden administration had articulated no clear plan for getting all American citizens still in Kabul out safely, much less the tens of thousands of Afghans who served beside American soldiers in various capacities and who now fear that they and their families will be subject to reprisals by the notoriously brutal Taliban.