US exit from Afghanistan leaves progress, anxiety in its wake: Reporter's Notebook

After nearly 20 years, the U.S. is leaving behind uncertainty in Afghanistan.

On a cold November morning in 2001, a new dawn was breaking over Afghanistan. History had been made overnight, even if many of the residents of the capital, Kabul, and the rebel fighters perched on a hillside overlooking it were unsure exactly what had just happened. A little over two months earlier, al-Qaida terrorists had attacked America, bringing bloodshed and tragedy to a shocked nation. The orders for the Sept. 11 attack had come from a land-locked, central Asian country that few outside elite intelligence and political circles were aware of and even fewer could locate on a map. The old hands knew Afghanistan though, it's where they'd helped mujahedeen fighters deal a crushing and humiliating blow to the dwindling might of the Soviet Red Army. But that was the 1980s and despite the billions of dollars spent backing the various insurgent groups, America celebrated the victory and promptly turned its attention to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The early 1990s were heady days in Europe. In Afghanistan, the country lapsed into all-out civil war. Hundreds of thousands are thought to have been killed, with many more wounded and driven from their homes. By the time one of the multitude of groups emerged victorious and rolled into Kabul, it was greeted with open arms by many in a shell-shocked and war-weary nation. The group was called the Taliban, an armed movement of Islamic fundamentalists from the rural south of the country, near the border with Pakistan.