US soldiers (file photo)

Rob Garver
VOA News
July 8, 2021

As the United States prepares to pull the last of its troops from Afghanistan, most recently abruptly turning over Bagram Airfield to Afghan authorities, the journey the U.S. has taken from the beginning of its longest war to what appears to be its end is one that many Americans would just as soon forget.

Since 2001, 2,448 Americans have died in the conflict. American researchers at Brown University estimate that 241,000 people have been killed in war zones in Pakistan and Afghanistan over that period, including 71,000 civilians.

The U.S. poured $2 trillion into trying to rebuild the country in the image of a Western democracy, but public opinion surveys now indicate a clear majority of Americans back President Joe Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan. More than one in three say they believe the war there cannot be won.

“The [American] public has not really cared about this war that much for a long time,” Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow and director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, told VOA. “Ever since roughly the overthrow of the Taliban in late 2001, this war just hasn’t mattered to that many people that much of the time. And the only time that was talked about very much in presidential politics was probably the 2008 presidential election. But it was not even a point of disagreement.”

Success seemed possible

On October 8, it will be a full 20 years since Americans across the country awoke to newspaper headlines announcing, “U.S. Strikes Back,” and coverage of a massive overnight air assault on targets in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. It had been less than a month since teams of al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four American jetliners on 9/11, crashing two into the World Trade Center in Manhattan, one into the Pentagon and one into a Pennsylvania field, killing 2,996 people in total.

Over the following weeks, Americans watched as the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had provided a safe haven for al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden, was routed by a combination of U.S. air power and an alliance of Afghan tribal militias.

By November, the Taliban had been driven from the country’s major cities: Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Kabul, Jalalabad. On December 5, with U.S. support, an interim government of Afghanistan was formed, led by Hamid Karzai. Days later, the Taliban’s last major stronghold in the southern city of Kandahar surrendered, and Mullah Omar, the group’s founder and leader, fled into hiding.

Americans were treated to romantic stories of bushy-bearded U.S. special forces operators who called in airstrikes while on horseback on the arid plains of northern Afghanistan.

At the time, it still seemed possible to imagine that the United States’ venture into Afghanistan would end with the brutally oppressive Taliban regime replaced with a Western-friendly democratic state that would serve as an example to people around the world as an alternative to extremism.

Dark chapter in US history

The two decades that followed the initial invasion of Afghanistan reflected a different reality.

Since U.S. boots first hit the ground, troop levels in the country have risen, dropped and risen again as efforts to install a durable, democratically elected government butted up against continuing suicide attacks and armed resistance by the Taliban and internecine squabbling among the United States’ nominal allies in the country. Over time, the Taliban regrouped and U.S. strategy evolved into a long-term counterinsurgency effort.

At the same time, the U.S. was forced to confront disturbing realities about its own policies.

Early in the war, the U.S. created a prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where U.S. troops held “enemy combatants” captured in Afghanistan, affording them neither due process rights nor the protections of the Geneva Conventions.

Rendition and torture

Over the next few years, the American public got the first hints of the extent to which the U.S. was using extralegal methods to capture and interrogate prisoners both in Afghanistan and elsewhere. They learned of the “extraordinary rendition” of suspects to “black sites” in countries where torture was commonplace and, in some cases, to places under U.S. control, like Bagram Airfield, outside Kabul.

Then came secret memos from the Department of Justice that purportedly cleared American officials themselves to use techniques such as waterboarding, commonly understood to be torture, to extract information from prisoners.

Even as it fought to defend itself against accusations that it had betrayed its own ideals, the U.S. launched another war, gathering allies to invade Iraq and destroy the weapons of mass destruction that the administration of President George W. Bush incorrectly insisted Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was hiding.

Afghanistan as afterthought

As the Iraq war raged, the focus of the U.S. public on Afghanistan faded. In part, said O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, that is an ironic artifact of the war’s initial popularity.

“There was overwhelming support in the fall of 2001 to punish the Taliban severely, even if we didn’t quite know what that meant,” he said.

As a result, there was relatively little initial argument about whether the U.S. ought to be in Afghanistan in the first place, and therefore a more widespread acceptance of the idea that the U.S. had a responsibility to maintain stability there.

Inside the U.S., meanwhile, the reckoning over Guantanamo Bay and the U.S. torture program — eventually recognized as such by the Obama administration — would drag on for years. To this day, Gitmo holds 40 prisoners.

A multi-administration struggle

Four different U.S. presidents — Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and now Joe Biden — attempted to give a democratically elected Afghan government the tools it needed to keep an on-again, off-again insurgency at bay.

After Republican Bush left office in 2009, Obama, a Democrat, surged troops and contractors into the country in his first term, pushing the U.S. presence to more than 100,000 before announcing a drawdown years later that left a force about one-tenth of that size in the country.

Trump, a Republican, had campaigned on extracting the U.S. from its “forever wars” and initially said that he would be bringing all U.S. forces home. However, not long into his presidency, he reversed those plans out of fear that the country would become a “vacuum” that would attract terror groups.

Coming home

In April of this year, Democrat Biden announced that virtually all the remaining U.S. troops in the country would be brought home before September 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of the attacks that triggered the war.

The tone of Biden’s comments when he announced the troop withdrawal was far from triumphalist.

“We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal, and expecting a different result,” he said. “I’m now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan: two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.”