The fall of Kabul in August 2021 was more than a military defeat. It was a diagnosis. After 20 years, trillions of dollars, and 2,461 American lives, we built an army that evaporated and a government that fled. The Taliban returned to power within days.

We killed Osama bin Laden and degraded al Qaeda, but we never changed the political conditions that generate threats. Twenty years of counterinsurgency doctrine, troop surges, and reconstruction spending never answered what kind of state could hold Afghanistan together without American troops propping it up.

We left Afghanistan worse than we found it: a generation raised on expectations of a modern future now living under medieval theocracy, with less food, less opportunity, and no horizon. Washington drew the wrong lesson. Rather than asking how we failed, we concluded the answer was simply to do less.

Moscow’s long return to Kabul

The Soviet Union lost roughly 15,000 men in Afghanistan over a decade before withdrawing in February 1989. Mikhail Gorbachev famously called Afghanistan “the bleeding wound,” a conflict that helped expose the Soviet system’s deeper weaknesses. Putin has drawn a different lesson.

Rather than sending Russian conscripts into the Hindu Kush, he sent emissaries and signed agreements. Russian technicians are refurbishing Taliban helicopters and Soviet-era armored vehicles, while an elite Taliban force reportedly receives Russian intelligence support.

Some argue that no Taliban officials were willing to engage after 2021, but my experience suggests otherwise. After the withdrawal, I traveled to Afghanistan three times to establish an educational program for boys and girls, addressing Taliban cultural concerns while preserving real opportunities.

Tribal elders, provincial governors, and Education Ministry officials expressed interest. Our inability to secure UNICEF’s support proved the real obstacle, not the Taliban officials we had met. We were not part of the network through which the agency preferred to move money and claim credit.

Three years later, our program has floundered. The officials willing to engage lost influence as hardliners consolidated power, and the window closed. A door that had never fully opened had been bolted shut from the inside.

The collapse we built

The American withdrawal did more than end a war; it dismantled much of the humanitarian infrastructure that might have preserved Afghan civil society while governments debated recognition. Facing domestic political pressure and institutional fatigue, the U.S. and its European partners sharply cut assistance. The U.N. secretary-general’s May report to the U.N. Security Council put Afghanistan’s humanitarian response plan at just 14% funded: $240 million of the $1.7 billion required.

The Taliban did not need to destroy much of Afghanistan’s humanitarian sector. We defunded it, and the Taliban finished the job. Eighty percent of humanitarian organizations in Afghanistan report being affected by funding cuts; 35% have reduced or closed their field presence.

U.N. investigators documented the closure of 420 health facilities affecting 3 million people and 300 nutrition sites serving nearly 90,000 malnourished children under 5. Organizations that survived the cuts confronted Taliban restrictions that forced further suspensions.

The Taliban exploited the vacuum with predictable efficiency: barring Afghan women employed by the United Nations from U.N. premises, revoking media licenses, and arbitrarily arresting journalists. The prohibition on girls’ education beyond sixth grade entered its fifth year without change.

The Islamic Emirate that Russia now arms and trains faces no mounting external pressure. It watched its principal adversaries dismantle the institutions capable of preserving an alternative future, then concluded it could consolidate power and wait.

Iran fills what Russia does not reach

While Washington focuses on Tehran’s nuclear program, Iran pursues a parallel strategy in Afghanistan that needs no formal coordination with Moscow to produce complementary results. Iran shares nearly 600 miles of border with Afghanistan, and Dari, the administrative language of Afghan governance, is a dialect of Farsi. Iran hosts 3 to 5 million Afghan refugees and has long viewed that population as both a humanitarian responsibility and a strategic asset.

Tehran and the Taliban nearly went to war in 1998, after Taliban fighters killed Iranian diplomats and journalists in Mazar-i-Sharif, yet that history did not prevent a pragmatic accommodation once the U.S. arrived: Both sides recognized that bleeding Washington served their interests better than fighting each other.

That logic has survived the American withdrawal. Iran maintains an embassy in Kabul, and trade flows steadily across the border. Russia approaches from the north while Iran anchors the western flank; the two need not coordinate, since geography and interest align.

This will come back to us

U.N. human rights investigators have described what Washington has been reluctant to confront: grinding poverty, persistent unemployment, and the systematic exclusion of half the population from education and economic life, conditions in which extremism can flourish again. This is precisely the soil in which Islamic extremism takes root: desperate populations, absent state legitimacy, and an ideological vacuum that hard-line clerics are only too willing to fill. Such movements rarely confine themselves to the borders where they were planted.

We have seen this before.

The Taliban emerged from the wreckage of the post-Soviet civil war, a generation of young men with little education and no horizon beyond what extremist madrasas offered. That same environment produced al Qaeda, and its reach extended far beyond Afghanistan to American soil. Today’s circumstances are not identical to those of the 1990s. In important respects, they are worse: The population is larger, civil society weaker, humanitarian institutions hollowed out, and the regime more entrenched.

Russia and China are filling the space the U.S. vacated, pursuing their own interests rather than acting as stewards. The Russia-Taliban accord is one step in a broader realignment that began when America withdrew and accelerated when the West abandoned the institutions that might have preserved an alternative future.

THE ‘AMERICA FIRST’ FOREIGN POLICY PUTS AMERICA LAST

Levy’s warning has aged into confirmation. Retreat creates no empty space, only opportunities that others are eager to exploit, and what follows reflects the interests of those who remain, not those who departed.

The lesson of Afghanistan is larger than Afghanistan itself. Military withdrawals end wars; they do not end strategic competition. We left the battlefield in 2021. We never contested what would replace us. Russia, Iran, and China have filled the vacuum. 

That may be the most enduring consequence of America’s longest war.