The Fall of Kabul and the End of the Forever War

AUG 30 2021 · 12:00

U.S. National Guard soldiers from the 34th Infantry Division providing security at Hamid Karzai International Airport during the Kabul evacuation, 28 August 2021. Place: Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul Figures: Major General Christopher Donahue, last US soldier out · Ashraf Ghani, departing Afghan president · the Taliban leadership, arrived two weeks early · the thirteen US service members killed at Abbey Gate, 26 August Two Weeks Early US intelligence in July 2021 projects the Afghan government will hold Kabul for ninety days after the American withdrawal. The Taliban take Kabul on 15 August, two weeks before the last US aircraft is scheduled to leave. President Ashraf Ghani flies out the same afternoon. The presidential palace falls without a shot. The twenty-year, eleven-month war that began in October 2001 ends in the airport perimeter, in seventeen days of evacuation chaos punctuated by a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate that kills thirteen American service members and at least 169 Afghan civilians on 26 August. On 30 August at 23:59 Kabul time, the last C-17 lifts off. Major General Christopher Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne, is photographed walking up the ramp alone in night vision, the last US soldier to leave Afghan soil. Total cost of the war by Brown University's Costs of War project: approximately 2.3 trillion dollars, approximately 174,000 deaths including roughly 70,000 Afghan civilians, 2,448 US service members, and 3,846 US contractors. The Project That Closes The post-2001 Western project assumed that Westphalian states could be assembled from outside: that with enough money, soldiers, ministerial training, NGO mentorship and electoral assistance, a sovereign state with a monopoly on legitimate violence could be cultivated in a territory that lacked one. Iraq from 2003. Afghanistan from 2001. Libya from 2011. Somalia, on and off. Mali, with the French in the lead. Kosovo, under UN administration. The track record by August 2021 is, charitably, mixed. Kabul's fall is the cleanest single declaration that the project is over. The Biden administration's defense of the withdrawal is explicit: the United States was not in Afghanistan to build a nation. It was in Afghanistan to deny territory to a particular terrorist organization. With that organization's leader killed in Pakistan in 2011, the original mission has been complete for a decade. The decade since was nation-building by inertia. The era of externally-assembled Westphalian sovereignty closes in the dust of the runway. Video: Reuters footage from 15 August 2021 as Taliban fighters enter Kabul and U.S. helicopters lift diplomatic staff from the embassy compound. The twenty-year republic collapsed in roughly ten days.