US Troop Draw Down in Afghanistan by 2021

America’s longest war is finally over. Now it’s time to learn from our mistakes

The completion of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan marks a milestone in history, not only for a South Asian country that has been marred by warfare for the last four decades but also for a superpower whose troops fought valiantly for two decades.

Because the most immediate concern over the last two weeks was getting Americans and Afghan allies out of harm’s way, introspection about the war has been in short supply. But with the mass airlift complete, U.S. policymakers no longer have an excuse to avoid contemplating the lessons of a 20-year war riven by hubris, flawed assumptions, and deceit. Concentrating predominantly on the evacuation’s questionable implementation over the last 20 days is simply inadequate—we need to spend our time dissecting the last 20 years.

Any prognosis of Washington’s misadventure in Afghanistan must account for three critical errors in judgment, each of which proved to be a major inflection point in the conflict...

Lindsey Graham says United States ‘will be going back’ into Afghanistan

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) says he believes the United States “will be going back into Afghanistan” despite the recently declared end of nearly two decades of American military presence in the country.

Graham, in an interview Monday with the BBC, predicted a looming clash between the Taliban and extremist groups such as the Islamic State would necessitate American military action in the country. “We will be going back into Afghanistan," Graham said. “We’ll have to, because the threat will be so large.”

He said that Afghanistan “will be a cauldron for radical Islamic behavior," presenting the United States with only two options: "You can say that’s no longer my problem … or hit them before they hit you”...

Five Myths About NATO and Afghanistan

As governments and international organizations around the world come to grips with the reality of a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, many foreign policy commentators are raising questions about how, after nearly 20 years of intervention by the international community, this could have happened. Experts have proffered several explanations for the rapid collapse of the Afghan state and army, such as Afghan corruption (and the U.S. role in enabling it), Pakistan’s hedging, and the political machinations of Hamid Karzai. Yet amid the shock and surprise many observers are expressing at the developments of the past several weeks, a troubling revisionist narrative is taking shape among European officials, analysts, and media outlets regarding NATO’s role in Afghanistan...

Afghanistan: A Tragic Lesson of the US Military’s Flawed Approach to Capacity Building

In the wake of Kabul’s collapse, experts and government officials need to answer a pivotal question: why did the United States fail to build a more effective Afghan military? In its misguided focus on training and equipping, the United States failed to prioritize a results-based approach. To avoid a similar fate with other counterterrorism training missions, the United States needs to invest in and empower assessment, monitoring, and evaluation...

Will the Taliban Regime Survive?

That the Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is immensely painful to the United States, NATO and many Afghans. In 2001, the U.S. overthrew the Taliban regime to defeat al-Qaeda, a goal it largely accomplished. But the U.S. also sought to vanquish the Taliban and leave behind a pluralistic, human-rights-respecting and economically-sustainable Afghan state. It failed in those objectives. There were plenty of mistakes and problems with the international efforts, but most importantly the United States never succeeded in inducing good governance in Afghanistan or persuading Pakistan to stop its multifaceted support for the Taliban. Afghan leaders constantly put their parochial and corrupt self-interests ahead of the national one. The misgovernance rot hollowed out even the Afghan security forces which the U.S. spent 20 years constructing at the cost of some $88 billion.

But will the Taliban be able to maintain itself in power? The answer depends on how it handles and prevents armed opposition to its rule and manages the country’s economy and relations with external actors...

Between Legitimacy and Control: The Taliban’s Pursuit of Governmental Status

On Aug. 15, amid the U.S. and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban took the capital, Kabul. On the same day, the incumbent President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, left the country, issuing a statement on his Facebook page which acknowledges the Taliban’s victory on the ground, which has been widely interpreted as a resignation, although it is not clear, as discussed below, that the statement met the constitutional requirements for a presidential resignation. Amrullah Saleh, the First Vice President of Afghanistan under Ghani, nevertheless subsequently claimed to be “caretaker” president, although he too has now reportedly fled the country. But regardless of who holds presidential power under Afghanistan’s constitution, it is the Taliban that appears to control the vast majority of Afghanistan’s territory. The Taliban has, moreover, declared the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and on Sept. 7, it announced a new government, comprised largely of well-known Taliban figures...

NATO head says alliance signed off on US withdrawal from Afghanistan

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed that the military alliance gave approval for the Biden administration’s complete withdrawal from Afghanistan, pushing back on speculation that leaders voiced objections to the decision.

In an interview with The New York Times published Friday, the NATO chief said that none of the alliance’s members voiced objections to President Biden’s plan to leave Afghanistan before his announcement in April...

Stoltenberg said that while NATO would have preferred to achieve a political solution in Afghanistan, he noted that the “problem was that the Taliban did not want to negotiate if the government in Kabul was part of those negotiations”...

Top US commanders in Afghanistan wrestle with mistakes and regrets as America's longest war ends

US commanders who led the war in Afghanistan are wrestling with the country's collapse to the Taliban, with some ruing the "pretty horrible mistakes" the US military made along the way and one of them flatly declaring America's longest war was not worth the price...

In "America's Longest War: What Went Wrong in Afghanistan," Tapper conducts in-depth interviews with eight US commanders who led the war effort over two decades and four administrations, and who speak with new candor about decisions made by their commanders-in-chief that they believe undermined the war effort and might have prevented its success.

In the interviews with the former military leaders and others, Tapper examines the mission and the missteps, how political decisions hurt the ability of service members to succeed, whether the Pentagon misrepresented the Afghan military's abilities to the public, and how after 20 years of sacrifice, the US withdrawal resulted in the return to power by the Taliban in August...

‘We Never Got It. Not Even Close’: Afghanistan Veterans Reflect on 20 Years of War

The last U.S. soldier to leave Afghanistan boarded a plane on Aug. 30, 2021. In the nearly two decades of war that preceded, more than 775,000 U.S. service members deployed to the country at least once. Over the course of the 20-year conflict, much about the war changed, from its primary mission to the support it enjoyed among the American public to the force deployment that sustained it. Notably, many veterans' attitudes toward the conflict in which they served have shifted as well.

To understand America's longest war through the eyes of those who fought it, POLITICO convened five veterans from different military services who deployed to Afghanistan at various points between 2001 and 2020. We discussed their early feelings about the war, the inflection points at which their thinking started to change and their reactions to the events of recent weeks and months. Most of the panelists described initial feelings of optimism that gave way to a sense that the U.S. mission was unrealistic. They spoke candidly about the fundamental flaws in the U.S. project, noting the lack of incentives for ordinary Afghans to support American objectives and expressing regret that the United States failed to see the country and the mission more clearly...