The Afghan Disaster

By: George Huang (2/28/22)

In August 2021, the United States ended its long-drawn-out war in Afghanistan. After twenty years of heavy military and political investment, the U.S. failed to pacify the Taliban and other insurgents or construct a stable Afghan government. Rather, in withdrawing, the U.S. inadvertently induced a devastating humanitarian crisis.

In the month following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban government and capture the al-Qaeda leaders who were in hiding.[1] The U.S. uprooted the Taliban by December 2001, and the task of building a new Afghan government began.[2] However, a stable political structure was never achieved, and insurgents perpetually plagued the new Afghan government and foreign military forces. 

By the summer of 2012, President Obama outlined a plan to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan, and the U.S. initiated preliminary peace talks with the Taliban leadership.[3] Obama’s timetable for withdrawal was not met, negotiations stifled, ISIS-K rose, and tensions grew. His successor, President Trump, also planned to remove soldiers from Afghanistan yet later rescinded his “original instinct” and advised that pulling out would create “a vacuum for terrorists.”[4] 

In February 2020, after years of tenuous negotiations, the Taliban and the U.S. signed a peace agreement indicating that the latter would withdraw from Afghanistan by May 2021 should the former commit to purging the country of terrorists.[5]  Throughout 2020, U.S. troops continued to leave Afghanistan, yet negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government yielded few results.

Ultimately, American troops failed to exit Afghanistan by the May 2021 deadline, and the Taliban asserted that it would not participate in “any conference” until all “foreign forces” had departed. President Biden reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to withdrawal and set a new target date.[6] As the American troops left Afghanistan, the Taliban advanced. On August 15, 2021, Kabul fell, and the Afghan government collapsed.[7] 

Merely one month after the evacuation of U.S. forces, the United Nations reported that 18 million Afghans, nearly half the population, depended on food aid. Furthermore, the United Nations Development Programme predicts that by mid-2022, “Afghanistan could face ‘universal poverty,’ with ninety-seven percent of Afghans living below the World Bank-designated international poverty line of $1.90 a day.”[8] Prior to the Taliban takeover, the Afghan Central Bank had approximately $7 billion stored at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, yet these funds have been inaccessible to the Taliban government. On February 11, 2022, to alleviate the unfolding humanitarian crisis, President Biden issued an executive order that would begin unfreezing $3.5 billion of the Afghan assets to make available to the Taliban.[9] 

U.S. military operations Allies Refuge and Allies Welcome reflect the attempt to evacuate at-risk Afghan civilians, such as interpreters and other supporters of American-Afghan military operations. During the evacuation of Kabul in July and August 2021, over 122,000 people were airlifted from Hamid Karzai International Airport.[10] According to the United Nations, merely one month following the U.S. withdrawal, Iran and Pakistan hosted 2.2 million Afghan refugees.[11] While nations such as Austria, Poland, and Switzerland have rejected Afghan arrivals, resettlement in the West is being facilitated. The United Kingdom has committed to hosting 20,000 refugees, Canada seeks to resettle 40,000, and Australia will host 3,000. France, Germany, and the U.S. have unspecified targets.[12] 

Ultimately, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has induced disastrous consequences for the people of Afghanistan and their neighbors. The sunk cost, geopolitical complexities, and administrative nuances may all help to rationalize America’s entanglement in a decades-long war, yet only time will tell whether the U.S. can confidently proclaim that its nation-building efforts were not in vain.

[1] “Secret U.S. Message to Mullah Omar: ‘Every Pillar of the Taliban Regime Will Be Destroyed,’” The National Security Archive: George Washington University, last modified September 11, 2011, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB358a/.

[2] Kenneth Katzman and Clayton Thomas, “Afghanistan: Post-Taliban Governance,

Security, and U.S. Policy,” Congressional Research Service, (December 2017): 7, https://sgp.fas.org/crs/row/RL30588.pdf.

[3] “Timeline: ​​The U.S. War in Afghanistan,” Council on Foreign Relations, accessed February 18, 2022, https://www.cfr.org/timeline/us-war-afghanistan.

[4] Jenna Johnson, “In escalating America’s longest war, Trump acts against his ‘original instinct,’” The Washington Post, August 21, 2017,  https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/against-his-original-instinct-trump-opts-to-escalate-in-americas-longest-war/2017/08/21/50a76516-868b-11e7-a50f-e0d4e6ec070a_story.html.

[5] “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan,” U.S. Department of State, February 29, 2020, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Agreement-For-Bringing-Peace-to-Afghanistan-02.29.20.pdf.

[6] Missy Ryan and Karen DeYoung, “Biden will withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021,” The Washington Post, April 13, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/biden-us-troop-withdrawal-afghanistan/2021/04/13/918c3cae-9beb-11eb-8a83-3bc1fa69c2e8_story.html.

[7] Clarissa Ward, Tim Lister, Angela Dewan, and Saleem Mehsud, “Afghan President Ashraf Ghani flees the country as Taliban forces enter the capital,” CNN, August 16, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/15/asia/afghanistan-taliban-advances-kabul-intl/index.html.

[8] “97 percent of Afghans could plunge into poverty by mid 2022, says UNDP,” United Nations Development Programme, September 9, 2021, https://www.undp.org/press-releases/97-percent-afghans-could-plunge-poverty-mid-2022-says-undp.

[9] “Executive Order on Protecting Certain Property of Da Afghanistan Bank for the Benefit of the People of Afghanistan,” The White House, February 11, 2022,  https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/02/11/executive-order-on-protecting-certain-property-of-da-afghanistan-bank-for-the-benefit-of-the-people-of-afghanistan/.

[10] Nicole Gaouette, Jennifer Hansler, Barbara Starr, and Oren Liebermann, “The last US military planes have left Afghanistan, marking the end of the United States’ longest war,” CNN, August 31, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/30/politics/us-military-withdraws-afghanistan/index.html.

[11] “Where are Afghan refugees going?” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, September 1, 2021, https://www.unrefugees.org/news/where-are-afghan-refugees-going/.

[12] “Afghanistan: How many refugees are there and where will they go?,” BBC News, August 31, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58283177.