Afghanistan
continued
Beyond question, there were many, many, MANY mistakes made in Afghanistan. John F. Sopko was the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) from 2012 to 2025. Thanks to his preparing the Afghanistan Papers – a set of interviews related to the war there – we now know that the American people were blatantly lied to, over and over.
In Mr. Sopko’s January 2025 guest essay for The New York Times, he outlined a list of systematic problems with the Afghanistan conflict – including that the U.S. government “struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects, and did not understand the country or its people.” He also made clear that there had been “a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades.” He then asked this question: “Why did so many senior officials tell Congress and the public, year after year, that success was on the horizon when they knew otherwise? For two decades, officials publicly asserted that continuing the mission in Afghanistan was essential to national interests, until, eventually, two presidents – Donald Trump and Joe Biden – concluded it was not.”
We want to be clear: Our problem with President Biden and President Trump is not that they concluded the mission in Afghanistan was no longer essential to our national interests. After all, they, like us, may not have made the decision to go into Afghanistan in the first place. Our problem is that we had already spent a fortune there in blood and treasure and they didn’t even try to salvage any of it.
According to the U.S. Department of Defense, the total military expenditure in Afghanistan, from October 2001 to December 2020, was $825 billion, with another $130 billion spent on reconstruction projects. The Costs of War project at the Watson Institute of International Affairs at Brown University estimates the actual cost is much higher:
Regarding the human toll, the Costs of War project says that...
Despite these mindboggling figures, America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan collapsed in just weeks. On July 1, 2021, U.S. forces left the major facility of Bagram Airbase. On August 6th, the Taliban seized control of Zaranj (the capital of Nimroz Province on the border with Iran); on August 12th and 13th, Afghanistan’s second- and third-largest cities, Kandahar and Herat, fell to the Taliban; and, two days later, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani left the country, and the Taliban took control of Kabul and its government buildings.
On August 31st, the last American evacuation aircraft left Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport and the United States Embassy in Kabul posted this notice on its website: “The U.S. Embassy in Kabul suspended operations on August 31, 2021. We will continue to assist U.S. citizens and their families in Afghanistan from Doha, Qatar.”
Almost immediately, the Taliban started hanging the bloody corpses of executed “criminals” in town squares and announced they would bring back not only public executions, but amputations as well. They started trolling the streets, going door-to-door to search for Afghans who helped America. Human Rights Watch reported that Taliban forces were systematically executing or forcibly “disappearing” former police and intelligence officers. Thousands upon thousands of Taliban fighters were swarming into Afghanistan from Pakistan at the urging of clerics and commanders.
The Afghan economy was in shambles and twenty-three million Afghans were experiencing extreme food insecurity. Early on, the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said that “ninety-five percent” of the country “did not have enough to eat.” He also said that Afghan families had resorted to selling some of their children to feed the rest of the family.
Practically overnight, images started to emerge of women and children who had very obviously been beaten. An incredibly brave group of women who staged a protest for women’s rights were reportedly attacked with rifle butts and metal clubs. Females of all ages were banned from what was once their schools and universities, women’s health clinics were closed indefinitely, and not only were jobs for women strictly restricted but, in some provinces, they were suddenly expected to wear head-to-toe burqas. By September 2024, new religious codes banned women from raising their voices, reciting the Quran in public and looking at men other than their husbands or relatives. By then, “religious morality officers” from the Ministry of Vice and Virtue, known for their white robes, were on the streets actively searching for violations.
Men were ordered to grow beards and wear traditional Afghan clothes, including prayer caps. Things for them also got much worse after the 2024 new religious codes. Now, men cannot look at women other than their wives or relatives, and they are prohibited from resembling non-Muslims in appearance or behavior in any way, which most take to mean a ban on jeans and Western-style haircuts. Men and women could not sit in the same sections at restaurants and in other public spaces, and women could not travel without a male relative. Music was banned and all foreign news broadcasts, television shows, and movies were shut down.
Afghanistan’s drug trade exploded. Already, Afghanistan supplied around 80 percent of global opiate users, but now the Taliban was positioned to expand their operations even more, especially with the discovery of a native plant called ephedra (known locally as oman). Ephedra is a natural source of the key ingredient used in meth.
General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, said it best: “It is obvious to all of us that the war in Afghanistan did not end on the terms that we wanted, with the Taliban now in power in Kabul. The war was a strategic failure.” This entire thing is just surreal to us. Did we really willingly relinquish twenty years of admirable progress to the Taliban for them to destroy in an instant? The realization that we have done exactly that makes us sick to our stomachs.
Biden said in his speech that “we have to be honest: our mission in Afghanistan has taken many missteps over the past two decades… I will not mislead the American people by claiming that just a little more time in Afghanistan will make all the difference.”
But, despite the mistakes of the past, the truth is MORE TIME WOULD HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE. A REALLY, REALLY BIG ONE. America and the Afghan government made countless missteps. Not many people, if any, deny that. However, we were JUST arriving at the point where the first generation of Afghans who were born into a world with freedom and without fear were coming of age. THEY are the ones who would have made all the difference.
At the time of the U.S. withdrawal, the average Afghan was 18 years old and almost two-thirds of the country was under 25. Living under the protection of America and NATO forces were all this generation had ever known. But, instead of using this huge advantage as a force of momentum, we ripped the rug out from under them, never even giving them the chance to lead.
THIS MAKES NO SENSE! We helped Afghanistan build schools and a health care system, a security force, infrastructure like roads and airports, and institutions like parliament and a justice system. Slowly, Afghanistan was becoming a civil society, finally on the right path in areas like health, education, communications, and improved living conditions.
Though, before the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan was still looking for sustainable sources of growth – and was still heavily dependent on foreign aid – the country’s GDP before the pandemic was $19.3 billion and the economy grew by 3.9 percent in 2019, according to the World Bank. The World Bank alone had committed over $4.7 billion for development projects, and the bank administered the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund which had raised over $12.27 billion.
America had spent $780 million to promote the rights of Afghan females. In 2006, First Lady Laura Bush was on hand to open the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF). The AUAF – established by a $100 million grant from the United States – became the country’s only coeducational school of higher education. As a result of our efforts, 40 percent of all students were female, and many had gone on to be government officials, doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer scientists, police officers, teachers, artists, small business owners and professional athletes. There was an Afghan female soccer team and mountaineering team, not to mention the Afghan Girls Robotics Team – made up of 25 girls, ranging in age from 12 to 18, who had captured the hearts of entire countries around the world.
These hopeful little girls, inspired teens, and empowered women trusted us. They believed in America and the principles we convinced them we stood for.
…and every step of the way, they fought so hard for their freedom. On August 24, 2016, the Taliban, armed with guns and explosives, attacked the AUAF. The ten-hour attack killed 15 people, ten of them students. Just weeks earlier, the Taliban had kidnapped two of the school’s English teachers, one from America and one from Australia (the teachers were finally released, in exchange for Taliban leaders, three years later). But the AUAF would not be denied! The resilient students and staff refused to cower in the face of terror and reopened, better than ever, less than one year later.
Now, however, we have stripped these same girls, teens and women of their hope and freedom and sentenced them to a life of draconian rules and abject misery.
We left at least 600 AUAF students behind. After several attempts were made to escape the country, their fates were sealed with a final email: “I regret to inform you that the high command at HKIA in the airport has announced there will be no more rescue flights.” The Taliban promptly took over the entire campus and started the hunt for the students who dared attend there. The school’s vice president of academic affairs Victoria Fontan told the radio network FranceInfo that, before school officials and faculty left, they “burned the university’s servers [and] all the documents we were able to take before leaving, such as the lists of professors, students.” After the students were told their names had been given to the Taliban, a 24-year-old sophomore named Hosay, who was studying business administration, told The New York Times, “We are all terrified. There is no evacuation, there is no getting out.” Hosay’s plan before the Taliban took control of her life was to get an M.B.A. and start an all-female engineering firm.
Statistically speaking, Hosay likely did not make it out of this alive, and I’m not being overdramatic. For obvious reasons, AUAF students were at the top of the Taliban’s death list. At an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council right after the Taliban takeover, the UN secretary general António Guterres said he was already “receiving chilling reports of severe restrictions on human rights” in Afghanistan and was “particularly concerned by accounts of mounting human rights violations against the women and girls of Afghanistan.”
It didn’t have to be this way.
At least 940,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. The number of people who have been wounded or have fallen ill because of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who have died indirectly because of the destruction of hospitals and infrastructure and environmental contamination, among other war-related problems.
Thousands of United States service members died in combat, as have thousands of civilian contractors. Many have died later from injuries and illnesses sustained in the war zones. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and contractors have been wounded and are living with disabilities and war-related illnesses. Allied security forces have also suffered significant casualties, as have opposition forces.
Far more of the people killed have been civilians. More than 432,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting since 2001. Millions of people living in the war zones have also been displaced by war. The U.S. post-9/11 wars have forcibly displaced at least 38 million people in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria. This number exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II.
Through FY2022, the United States federal government has spent and obligated $8 trillion dollars on the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere. This figure includes direct Congressional war appropriations; war-related increases to the Pentagon base budget; veterans care and disability; increases in the homeland security budget; interest payments on direct war borrowing; foreign assistance spending; and estimated future obligations for veterans’ care.” Keep in mind that “this total omits many other expenses, such as the macroeconomic costs to the U.S. economy; the opportunity costs of not investing war dollars in alternative sectors; future interest on war borrowing; and local government and private war costs.