America’s longest war, which spanned 20 years and included more than 800,000 U.S. troops, ended one year ago when Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division, XVIII Airborne Corps, boarded the last C-17 cargo plane out of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Four U.S. presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden — oversaw the war that began in October 2001, just weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but only the current administration was able to do what the final three sought: to end the war.
The withdrawal effort began when the Trump administration signed the Doha agreement with the Taliban on Feb. 29, 2020, to ensure U.S. troops left by May 1, 2021. Experts point to the U.S. deal with the Taliban as the nexus that ultimately resulted in the crumbling of both the Afghan government and the Afghan military.
Biden extended that timeline to Sept. 11, 2021 — the date ultimately became Aug. 30 for security reasons — as he expressed optimism that the country’s government, led by President Ashraf Ghani, and its military would survive without the physical backing of the U.S. forces.
In a July 8, 2021, press conference, the president noted that the Afghan military was made up of 300,000 “well equipped” fighters going up “against something like 75,000 Taliban.” He defiantly said that the fall of the Ghani government was “not inevitable,” in part because, he said, he trusted “the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more competent in terms of conducting war.“
The president was proven wrong when the Taliban rapidly took over the country at the beginning of last August, which prompted the massive evacuation effort to escape the repressive regime. The chaotic withdrawal was capped by the deaths of 13 American service members who were killed in an ISIS-K terrorist bombing at the Kabul airport.
Here’s a look at the toll of America’s longest war:
Toll on the troops
The war effort meant the deployment of more than 800,000 U.S. troops overseas. More than 22,300 of them were killed or injured in Afghanistan during the 20-year war.
The Department of Defense has said that 2,352 U.S. troops were killed in action, while the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction put the number at about a hundred more, but millions more are still facing the mental and physical consequences of war. Another 1,144 allied troops died in the conflict.
At least 66,000 Afghan troops have been killed, according to SIGAR, which also found that more than 48,000 Afghan civilians were killed and that at least 75,000 were injured since 2001.
Largest evacuation effort
Many former Afghan military members who worked with the United States over those two decades face threats from the Taliban on their lives and those of their families. The U.S. military attempted to evacuate as many at-risk Afghans during the final two weeks of August 2021 once the Taliban took over.
Roughly 120,000 people were evacuated during that time, the largest military evacuation in the nation’s history, but thousands of Afghans who worked with the U.S. were left behind as well.
Many Afghans who worked with U.S. troops reached out to their American counterparts for help once the Taliban came into power. The flood of messages led U.S. veterans to work together with various organizations to arrange secret passage through Kabul and onto the airport grounds.
“More innocent people in danger of starvation than any other country in the world,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “Right up to the allies that we left behind, the tens of thousands of people who trusted us put their lives on the line not just for their country but for ours, for the United States of America. And they trusted us because we guaranteed their safety and freedom if they work for us. We have yet to make good on that promise.”
Cost of war
Biden, who has claimed that his hands were tied as a result of the Trump administration’s deal with the Taliban, became the president who did what the presidents before him couldn’t — he pulled troops from Afghanistan.
Despite intending to pull out the troops, the administration requested a funding increase for Afghan security forces to $3.33 billion for fiscal year 2022, according to a SIGAR report, but the Afghan forces collapsed as the Taliban launched a military offensive with the U.S. preparing to leave.
The war cost the U.S. government more than $2.3 trillion, ranging from the Defense Department and State Department’s overseas contingency operations budgets to veterans’ healthcare and the estimated interest rate on the war, per Brown University.
Afghanistan Afghan Army Unit
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Almost all Afghans live in poverty
When the U.S. invaded in October 2001, the Taliban had been in control of the country, and the group allowed al Qaeda, the terror group responsible for 9/11, to plan and operate within their borders. The U.S. was able to chase them out of power by November 2001, and the interim government soon allowed for Afghan society to progress for education and gender equality, which continued until the middle of August 2021.
Now, with the return of Taliban rule, 92% of Afghans are facing food insecurity following the conclusion of the war, whereas only 62% were in that position before the war began, according to Brown University, while the percent of children under the age of 5 facing acute malnutrition has jumped fivefold — 9% in 2001 to 50% now. And 97% of the slightly less than 40 million Afghans are living in poverty, while 80% were before the war.
The rise of the Taliban meant a return of repressive conditions for women who went from holding jobs of prominence in Afghan society as business executives and lawyers to disappearing from public view.
The freezing of Afghan assets internationally and other factors have meant the people are facing a humanitarian crisis.
“The humanitarian piece, and that involves everything from women and girls who had a taste of freedom for 20 years under the protection of American troops and are now being subjugated back to the Middle Ages under the Taliban, to the broad humanitarian crisis that is engulfing the country,” Moulton, an Iraq War veteran who secretly traveled to Afghanistan last August amid the chaotic evacuation efforts, said.
afghanistan withdrawal timeline
Lives lost in the final days
One of the lasting images of the war followed the ISIS-K suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops and 170 Afghan civilians with less than a week to go before the U.S.’s withdrawal. The bomber detonated his device outside the airport, where evacuations were being conducted. Days later, the U.S. military believed a man was posing an imminent threat to the evacuation efforts and launched a drone strike, killing the target and nine others, seven of whom were children. He was revealed to be an aid worker who the Pentagon later acknowledged was, in fact, not a terrorist.
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Many of the families of the 13 service members who died in the Abbey Gate airport bombing expressed frustration with the current commander in chief in recent interviews with the Washington Examiner.
Toxic aftershocks
Roughly 3.5 million U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were exposed to toxic burn pits, which were formed when troops would burn their waste. Earlier this month, Biden signed a comprehensive veterans’ healthcare bill into law, despite eleventh-hour hurdles, in a testament to the tireless activists who visited Capitol Hill time and time again to push for the legislation.
Biden called the legislation “the most significant law our nation has ever passed to help millions of veterans who are exposed to toxic substances during their military services.”
