Afghanistan: A Disaster Twenty Years in the Making

By Boaz Fox ‘23
Late at night on August 30, Army Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue stepped aboard a C-17 transport aircraft, becoming the last American serviceman to leave Afghanistan, marking the end of America’s longest and most expensive war. Maj. Gen. Donahue was just one of over eight hundred thousand American soldiers to serve in the Afghan War, and more than two thousand of those soldiers, in addition to nearly fifty thousand Afghani civilians, had died during this period. This unwinnable war had gone on far too long, and ending it was America’s only option.

The war officially began on 7 October, 2001, with the goal of destroying Al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that perpetrated the September 11 terror attacks, and capturing or killing their leader, Osama bin Laden. Even in the beginning of the war, American forces made fateful miscalculations. In mid-December of that year, the U.S. had the opportunity to achieve this objective at the battle of Tora Bora, but the first in a series of grave military errors allowed bin Laden, and with him the Al-Qaeda movement, to escape to Pakistan. The two decade long war could have lasted for two months. 
Nevertheless, through twenty years and four presidencies, the goal of the war changed from destroying terrorists to building a new nation. The main issue was that the wrong one was being built. 
The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the new government being set up, was corrupt and protected by a useless military. Instead of encouraging local militias to fight the Taliban, the Islamic group that governed Afghanistan until the American invasion, then-President Bush ordered these small armed groups to be disbanded in favor of a singular national army.
Despite tens of billions of American taxpayer dollars being funneled into the new Afghan National Army, they could barely function. Soldiers showed up late to training, were regularly high on drugs, walked off in the middle of battles, and could not even do jumping jacks. It should have been obvious that aiding the Afghan National Army was futile.
In May 2011, American commandos killed bin Laden in a covert operation. The mission did not take place in Afghanistan, the very country the U.S. began a war with in order to kill him, but in Pakistan, a neighboring nation with whom America was an ally. The U.S. did not need to be in Afghanistan to kill him. Despite bin Laden’s death, America did not leave, staying for ten more futile years.
That the only successfully completed objective of the Afghan War did not even happen in Afghanistan only shows how useless the whole war was. All other attempts at nation building failed, and America should have realized the impossibility of this at the start instead of being blinded by anger and fanaticism.
This is the history of disorganization leading up to President Biden’s decision to expedite the removal of the final American soldiers from Afghanistan. “I was not going to extend this forever war,” President Biden said in an address, “and I was not extending a forever exit.”
The logistics of Biden’s exit relied on the Afghan National Army holding off the Taliban. With so much time and money spent on training and equipping them, they had to have had some capacity to protect their nation. But while American intelligence agencies estimated that the Afghan National Army’s control over Afghanistan would last at least 18 months, the Taliban took command of the nation in only 11 days.
Even as soon as the withdrawal began, the Afghan government completely fell apart. Afghan National Army soldiers fled to neighboring Uzbekistan, while President Ashraf Ghani flew on a cash-filled helicopter to Tajikistan. Cities that took years to control fell to the Taliban in a matter of hours.
The rapid fall of Afghanistan, especially of the capital, Kabul, demonstrates how necessary the withdrawal was. The war was unwinnable. No matter how much money (over $83 billion) was thrown at the Afghan government, the war would never end.
From the very beginning, the war proved itself to be a deadly mess of mistakes and wasted money. Everyday America lengthened its participation, entrenching itself deeper and deeper into an unwinnable war.
If our leaders had not made horrendous mistakes or had realized the futility of building up the Afghan National Army, the war could have gone differently. But it became a waste of time, American soldiers and taxpayer dollars.