Last U.S. forces leave Afghanistan
Taliban soldiers’ celebratory gunfire lights up sky over capital of Kabul
The last United States forces left Afghanistan late Monday, ending a 20-year occupation that began shortly after the al-Qaida attacks on 9/11, cost over $2 trillion, took more than 170,000 lives and ultimately failed to defeat the Taliban, the Islamist militants who allowed al-Qaida to operate there.
Five American C-17 cargo jets flew out of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul just before midnight, U.S. officials said, completing a hasty evacuation that left behind tens of thousands of Afghans desperate to flee the country, including former members of the security forces and many who held valid visas to enter the United States.
“A new chapter of America’s engagement with Afghanistan has begun,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday evening. “It’s one in which we will lead with our diplomacy. The military mission is over.”
But the war prosecuted by four presidents over two decades, which gave Afghans a shot at democracy and freed many women to pursue education and careers, failed in nearly every other goal. Ultimately, the Americans handed the country back to the same militants they drove from power in 2001.
Jubilant Taliban fighters and their supporters reveled in victory as the news became clear. Celebratory gunfire broke out across the city in the predawn hours Tuesday in Kabul, the arc of tracer rounds lighting up the night sky.
“The last American soldiers departed from Kabul airport, and our country has achieved a full independence, thanks to God,” Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesperson, said on Twitter.
The U.S. departure was marred by a ghastly burst of civilian casualties that seemed emblematic of the American missteps in the war.
A drone strike that the U.S. military said was aimed at thwarting an attack on the airport killed 10 civilians, survivors said, including seven children, an aid worker for an American charity organization, and a contractor with the U.S. military.
Such so-called civilian collateral damage was a primary reason so many Afghans turned against the Americans after initial goodwill in the early years of the U.S. intervention. In the end, the number of Afghan civilians killed in the war — more than 47,000 according to Brown University’s Cost of War project — approached the number of dead fighters.
The Taliban gave few signs Monday they were ready to govern a country of nearly 40 million facing a major humanitarian crisis, with about half the population malnourished, according to the United Nations.
The Taliban’s leader, cleric and judge Haibatullah Akhundzada, remained out of sight, having issued no statement since the insurgents seized Kabul two weeks ago. One Kabul-based diplomat expressed doubt over whether he is even alive, although a Taliban spokesperson insisted Akhundzada was in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan.
“They are a little bit stunned by running a big urban center like Kabul,” a city of up to 5 million at its peak, the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “They are really playing from a very weak hand.”
The diplomat said that an unresolved rift between the group’s moderates, like the political chief, Abdul Ghani Baradar, who led the negotiations with the United States, and hard-liners like the Haqqani brothers, the military leaders, was further weakening the ex-insurgents.
President Joe Biden, who took responsibility for ending a war that may yet come to define his presidency, had set a Tuesday deadline for completing the withdrawal.
But senior commanders decided to depart unannounced roughly 24 hours earlier, partly because of stormy weather forecast for Tuesday but also to build in a cushion in case of any snags, military officials said, including further attacks by ISIS-K.
In the final hours of the evacuation, U.S. surveillance and attack aircraft locked down the skies over Kabul, circling high overhead until the last transport plane was aloft.
“Job well done,” said Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division, who was on the last plane out. “Proud of you all.”
A military official said that every American who wanted to leave and could get to the airport was taken out. But a number of Americans, thought to be fewer than 300, remain, either by choice or because they were unable to reach the airport.
But the evacuation did not reach all those Afghans who had assisted the United States over the years, and who now face possible Taliban retribution.
An unknown number of those who made it through the tortuous process for special visas granted to U.S. collaborators never even made it to the airport, much less onto an evacuation flight.
“Because I worked with the Americans, I won’t be able to put food on my table, and I won’t be able to live in Afghanistan,” said one special visa holder, Hamayoon, in an interview on Monday from Kabul. “I risked my life for many years, working for the Americans, and now my life is at even greater risk.
“If I go back to my family house, the Taliban will chase me,” he said. “Our neighbors already told them I worked with the Americans. I am in a miserable situation. The Americans betrayed us.”