The speed of Afghanistan’s disintegration caught all observers, including U.S. intelligence, off guard. On August 6, 2021, Taliban forces took the provincial capital Zaranj, without a fight; then Shebergan, capital of Jowzjan province, a day later; then moved through three more cities the next day. They fell without significant resistance as Afghan security forces—trained and equipped by the U.S. for years—either fled, defected, or simply melted away. President Joe Biden reiterated his support for the U.S. withdrawal “I do not regret the decision,” he said at the time. As the Washington Post reported, U.S. intelligence officials had downgraded their estimate for how long Kabul would hold out, from up to a year to as soon as a month. By August 15, the Taliban took the city, and Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.
Operation Allies Refuge—an evacuation effort to airlift out translators, embassy employees, and other at-risk Afghan civilians—became a desperate race against time. Anyone who had worked directly or indirectly for the United States was under grave threat, as were their families. A March 2022 after-action report noted that “evacuation efforts quickly escalated into a massive humanitarian airlift,” transporting more than 125,000 people out of the country through Kabul’s single-runway international airport (at that time known as the Hamid Karzai International Airport, but later renamed by the Taliban to the Kabul International Airport). Amid growing pandemonium, on August 21, leaders of the evacuation effort shut down all entrances to the airport, other than Abbey Gate. Five days later, an ISIS-K suicide bomber detonated himself there, killing 13 U.S. military service members and 169 civilians.
Though the chaos of the early days has subsided, four years later, conditions in Afghanistan are bleak. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan—the official title for the Taliban’s government—is only recognized as legitimate by Russia. The country’s economy has shrunk by a third, unemployment has been as high as 20 percent, poverty is rampant, trust in financial institutions is low, the public health system has nearly collapsed, and its citizens have lost access to much of their international aid. The U.S. provided $3.83 billion between August 2021 and 2025, but the final report from the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), published August 13, 2025, found that the Taliban systematically exploited every available method—including force, regulatory control, corruption, and collusion with U.N. officials—to steal or divert U.S. aid. The U.S. canceled nearly all its humanitarian assistance to the country in April 2025 as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to foreign aid.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan suffers drought, with Kabul’s underground water reserves depleting, and most of the city’s fought-over supply is brought in by, as the New York Times put it, “Chinese-made tricycles and Soviet-era trucks.” At the current pace, Kabul and its 6 million residents will be without water by 2030. Multiple dam and water supply projects had been underway or approved, with budgets in the hundreds of millions, but most stopped or were functionally canceled after the Taliban seized control.
In his first press conference, on August 17, 2021, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid promised that “Private media can continue to be free and independent” and that the Taliban would “allow women to work and study.” In the years since, the Taliban have arrested many Afghan journalists, and Afghanistan has among the world’s harshest restrictions on women and girls. The regime excludes girls from education beyond the sixth grade and bars women from most employment, unaccompanied travel, leaving the house without a burqa, and speaking outside the home.
The U.S. withdrawal was widely considered a failure—one from which Biden’s approval ratings would never recover—but it was a move with bipartisan buy-in. Most Americans supported bringing the troops home and agreed that after 20 years, the U.S. had not achieved its goals in Afghanistan. Trump has blamed the Biden administration for its calamitous end—“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world”—but it was his first presidential administration that started this move. A 2023 Biden administration report argued that “President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor.”
The first Trump administration signed the Doha Agreement between the United States and the Taliban in February 2020. The peace deal outlined a phased, concessions-based exit of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. The Taliban would cut ties with al-Qaeda and all other terrorist groups and negotiate leadership of the country with the standing Afghan government. In turn, the U.S. would acknowledge the Taliban government and normalize relations.
The Trump administration’s clear goal was getting out as soon as possible, but it was ultimately Biden who authorized the deal, announcing in April 2021 that the U.S. would withdraw most of its troops by September 11, 2021—20 years after the terrorist attacks that set the U.S. occupation in motion.
“The withdrawal agreement with only the Taliban delegitimized the Afghan government, and legitimized the Taliban,” the former chief of staff to President Ashraf Ghani, Matin Bek, told TMD that. “It paved the way for the Taliban to not talk with the Afghan government and take over.”
John Bolton, the national security adviser during Trump’s first term, agreed. “The worst part is that this negotiation went on between the U.S. and Taliban and kept the government excluded,” he told TMD. “I mean, this was the government we helped create, and we weren’t prepared to let them sit at the table.” Bolton sees the withdrawal as “clearly a mistake,” noting that, beyond the risks of Taliban rule itself, the country “is again becoming a magnet for foreign terrorists,” with ISIS-K committing more terrorist attacks, while operating from Afghanistan. “Our presence there allowed us an extraordinary opportunity to see what was going on in places that could harbor terrorist planning,” Bolton explained. “The risk from Afghanistan has risen, and our ability to detect it has decreased.”
In October 2021 testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster warned that the withdrawal could have consequences for the U.S. in terms of what it signals to our adversaries around the world. “Surrender and withdrawal in Afghanistan detracted from rather than reinforced our ability to deter great power conflict and compete with China and Russia.” Four years later, with wars in Ukraine and Gaza, a friendly (and recognized) government in Afghanistan may have been helpful.
Meanwhile while the U.S. stands firm in its isolation policy toward Afghanistan, it has failed to pressure the Taliban on its human rights abuses, some analysts say. “The administration has not spoken up about the human rights situation in the country, in particular the rights of women and girls,” the Brookings Institution’s Madiha Afzal, an expert in U.S.-Afghanistan policy, told TMD. “And while the previous administration’s statements on this were ineffectual, they at least served as a reminder of where the U.S. stands on these issues.”
The former U.S. Embassy in Kabul—once the nerve center for all the United States’ diplomatic work to help Afghanistan stand on its own—has now been painted over with murals, including the Taliban’s flag and a fallen American flag.
