Fall of Kabul (2021)

Based on Wikipedia: Fall of Kabul (2021)

The American intelligence community thought they had six months. They had six days.

On August 15, 2021, the Taliban captured Kabul, ending a twenty-year war in a single afternoon. The speed of the collapse shocked everyone—the generals who had trained Afghan forces, the diplomats who had negotiated peace deals, the intelligence analysts who had built sophisticated models, and most of all, the Afghan civilians who suddenly found themselves living under a government that had been officially defeated two decades earlier.

How does a nation with a three-hundred-thousand-strong military, equipped and trained by the world's most powerful armed forces, dissolve in a matter of weeks? The answer reveals something profound about the nature of power, legitimacy, and the limits of what can be built from the outside.

The Deal That Changed Everything

On February 29, 2020, in a luxury hotel in Doha, Qatar, the United States and the Taliban signed what they called the "Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan." The name was aspirational at best, deceptive at worst.

What made this deal remarkable wasn't just its terms—it was who wasn't at the table. The Afghan government, the entity supposedly being defended by American troops, wasn't a party to the agreement. Some observers compared this to the Munich Agreement of 1938, when European powers negotiated Czechoslovakia's fate without Czechoslovakian input. The comparison was uncomfortable because it was apt.

The deal's terms were straightforward. The United States would withdraw all troops by May 1, 2021. In exchange, the Taliban promised not to harbor terrorists. American forces would stop attacking Taliban positions. Sanctions would be lifted. Prisoners would be released.

But the devil lived in the details—and in the secret annexes that even the Afghan government wasn't allowed to see.

One provision proved particularly devastating. American aircraft could not strike Taliban fighters who remained more than five hundred meters from their targets. This seemingly technical restriction transformed the battlefield. Taliban commanders quickly learned they could mass forces just outside the invisible line, then overwhelm isolated Afghan positions before air support could respond. The single greatest advantage the Afghan military had over the insurgents—American airpower—had been neutralized with a stroke of a pen.

The Collapse of Will

Military analysts often focus on hardware: tanks, helicopters, rifles, ammunition. But armies run on something far more fragile than steel and gunpowder. They run on belief.

The Afghan National Security Forces—a term encompassing both the army and police—had always struggled with morale. Corruption was endemic. Pay was unreliable. Leadership was often appointed through political connections rather than competence. Soldiers in remote outposts sometimes went months without resupply.

The Doha deal shattered what remained of their will to fight.

The Taliban's propaganda operation moved into high gear. Their message was simple and devastating: America has already surrendered. They're just not telling you yet. The secret parts of the deal? Those hand over your provinces to us. Your commanders know this. That's why they're not sending reinforcements. You're being sacrificed.

Some of this was true. Much of it was exaggeration. All of it was believed.

Across the country, local police units and military outposts began negotiating their own surrenders. District by district, province by province, the Afghan state dissolved not through military defeat but through a cascading loss of faith. Soldiers who had fought for years decided that dying for a government their allies had already abandoned made no sense.

The Lightning Offensive

The Taliban launched their major offensive on May 1, 2021—the original deadline for American withdrawal. The symbolism was intentional.

What followed defied every prediction. Provincial capitals that were expected to hold for months fell in days. Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city and the Taliban's spiritual birthplace, fell on August 12. Herat, the cultured western city that had resisted Taliban rule in the 1990s, fell the next day. Mazar-i-Sharif, the northern stronghold that had been the last to fall in 2001, surrendered on August 14.

The intelligence estimates kept shrinking. In July, analysts predicted the government could last six to twelve months after American troops departed. By early August, they thought Kabul might hold for "several months." Five days before the fall, the estimate was thirty to ninety days.

Two days before the end, someone finally got it right: the city would fall within a week.

The Last Morning

On the morning of August 15, the Taliban's senior commanders issued an order that surprised their own fighters: halt at the gates of Kabul. Do not enter by force. The leadership wanted to negotiate a peaceful transfer of power, to avoid the street fighting that would delegitimize their victory in the eyes of the world.

Muhammad Nasir Haqqani, a Taliban commander, arrived at the city's outskirts expecting a fight. He found nothing. Not a single soldier. Not one policeman. The Afghan state had already evaporated.

In the city itself, the day before had been ordinary in all the ways that made the coming hours so surreal. Timor Sharan, who ran the Afghanistan Policy Lab, had gone shopping. He noticed something in the faces around him—not panic, but a kind of paralyzed resignation. People, he said, seemed "stuck in an uncertain future and never able to dream, aspire, think, and believe anymore."

By midday, the Taliban's official restraint was becoming irrelevant. Lower-level fighters, seeing no resistance, began moving into the city regardless of orders. They raised their white flags over government buildings. They walked into police stations and collected weapons without firing a shot.

The President Vanishes

President Ashraf Ghani had addressed the nation that morning, promising to defend the capital. Behind the scenes, the situation was deteriorating by the minute.

Hamdullah Mohib, Ghani's national security advisor, received a call from Khalil Haqqani, a leader of the Haqqani network—a particularly ruthless Taliban faction. Haqqani's message was simple: surrender and meet with us.

Mohib called his American contacts in Doha. Tom West, the deputy American negotiator, delivered a warning: the meeting might be a trap. After hanging up, Mohib turned to his president with words that would end the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan: "It's time, Mr. President. We have to leave."

What happened next remains disputed.

Ghani later claimed he never intended to leave Afghanistan. He said he planned to drive to the Ministry of Defense headquarters within Kabul to coordinate the city's defense. But the car never arrived. His security team instead rushed him to a helicopter, telling him they would fly to Khost, a city in eastern Afghanistan still ostensibly under government control.

Once airborne, Ghani learned that Khost had fallen. So had Jalalabad. There was nowhere in Afghanistan to land.

The helicopter flew to Uzbekistan.

Ghani's own cabinet members didn't know he had fled until it was over. Neither did the Americans. When President Joe Biden learned that Ghani had abandoned the capital, witnesses said he "exploded in frustration."

Late that night, from somewhere in Central Asia, Ghani posted on Facebook. The Taliban, he wrote, "had won with the judgment of their swords and guns." He claimed he had left to prevent bloodshed. Whether this was wisdom or cowardice would be debated for years.

The Palace Falls

The Arg—Kabul's presidential palace—was evacuated by helicopter as Taliban fighters approached. Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of the Taliban's co-founders who had been imprisoned for years and released as part of various peace negotiations, landed at Hamid Karzai International Airport to begin forming a government.

At 8:55 that evening, the Taliban announced they had taken the Arg. Journalists from Al Jazeera were invited inside to document the moment. Taliban fighters, many of them young men from rural villages who had never seen such opulence, wandered through gilded halls and sat behind ornate desks.

Shortly after nine o'clock, they declared the restoration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan—the same name used by the Taliban government that had ruled from 1996 to 2001, before the American invasion that followed the September 11 attacks.

Twenty years of war had come full circle.

The Exodus

While the Taliban was taking the palace, the airport became the last fragment of a vanishing world.

Kabul's streets gridlocked within hours. Residents abandoned their cars and walked toward the airport, some carrying nothing, others dragging suitcases they would never get through the gates. People who had worked with the American-backed government, with international organizations, with foreign embassies, destroyed their identification documents as they walked—papers that had once opened doors would now mark them for Taliban retribution.

The scenes at the airport gates would become some of the most indelible images of the twenty-first century. Crowds pressed against barriers. Babies were passed over razor wire to soldiers. Desperate Afghans clung to the wheels of departing aircraft and fell to their deaths after takeoff.

Between August 14 and August 30, American and allied forces evacuated more than 123,000 people—the largest non-combatant evacuation in American military history. Of these, 79,000 were processed directly by American military personnel. They included diplomats, journalists, human rights workers, translators who had served alongside American troops, and ordinary Afghans who had cast their lot with the international presence.

Many more were left behind. The majority of Afghans who had applied for American visas—including interpreters who had risked their lives for twenty years—could not get through the crowds, could not reach the airport, could not prove their credentials in time.

A City Transformed

In the days before the Taliban arrived, Kabul's markets told a story of fear.

Burqas—the full-body coverings that had been mandatory under the previous Taliban regime—had cost about two hundred afghanis, roughly two and a half American dollars. By August 14, the price had risen to three thousand afghanis, fifteen times higher. Women who had spent twenty years building careers, earning degrees, and living in public suddenly faced the prospect of disappearing from civic life entirely.

Female university students were evacuated from dormitories before the Taliban could reach them. Across the city, women with higher education hid their diplomas. Khalida Popal, the former captain of Afghanistan's women's national football team, sent a message to current players: burn your uniforms. The jerseys that had represented national pride and women's progress had become evidence of crimes against Taliban ideology.

Shop owners painted over advertisements featuring women's faces. Public posters were defaced. The visual landscape of the city was being scrubbed of half its population.

Refugee camps that had formed around the capital, filled with people who had fled Taliban advances in the provinces, found themselves trapped. They had run toward what they thought was safety. Now there was nowhere left to run.

What the Collapse Reveals

The fall of Kabul was not primarily a military defeat. The Afghan forces had weapons. They had training. They had numbers. What they didn't have was a reason to die for a government that seemed to exist mainly as a mechanism for moving American money into private pockets.

The Doha agreement crystallized what many Afghans already suspected: their American allies had decided to leave, and everything else was negotiable. The secret annexes, the reduced air support, the prisoner releases, the legitimization of Taliban negotiators—all of it sent a message that the Afghan government received clearly even if it couldn't articulate it: you are being handed over.

Governments derive their power from the belief that they will continue to exist. Once that belief cracks, collapse can happen faster than anyone imagines. The Afghan security forces didn't lose a decisive battle. They simply stopped believing there was anything worth defending.

This is perhaps the most important lesson of the fall of Kabul. Twenty years, trillions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of lives could not build a state that its own defenders believed in. The buildings were real. The uniforms were real. The weapons were real. But the legitimacy—the shared sense that this government represented something worth fighting for—was never successfully constructed.

The Aftermath

The American military completed its withdrawal on August 30, 2021. Even then, roughly a thousand people with American connections remained stranded in Kabul, including American citizens and Afghans with valid American visas. Two weeks later, Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged the number was actually several thousand.

The Taliban immediately began reimposing restrictions on women's education, employment, and movement—though initially with less uniformity than during their previous rule. International humanitarian organizations tried to maintain operations while navigating the reality of a government run by people on terrorism watch lists.

President Ghani eventually surfaced in the United Arab Emirates. His defense minister, intelligence chief, and several other senior officials scattered across Pakistan and Central Asia. The speaker of the parliament fled to Pakistan. The government hadn't just fallen—it had dispersed like smoke.

Those who remained faced a changed world. The women who had built careers. The journalists who had reported freely. The activists who had organized. The translators who had helped foreign forces. All of them had to navigate a new reality where the progress of two decades had been reversed in a single afternoon.

The fall of Kabul demonstrated something that military planners often forget: you cannot build a nation from the outside. You can provide weapons, training, money, and advisors. You can defeat enemies on the battlefield. But you cannot give a government the legitimacy that makes its citizens willing to defend it. That has to be earned, cultivated, grown from within.

The United States spent twenty years trying to construct an Afghan state that could survive without American support. In the end, it couldn't survive a two-week offensive once American commitment wavered. The buildings were still standing. The army still had its rifles. But the belief was gone, and without belief, everything else is just theater.

On a single August day, the theater closed.