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The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan ended on 15 August 2021. That afternoon, President Ashraf Ghani fled the capital city by helicopter to neighboring Uzbekistan. Just days earlier, he had sworn never to leave and said that he would die before abandoning his people. With Ghani gone, the Taliban offensive, which had captured dozens of provincial capitals in the preceding weeks, easily entered Kabul. Within hours, the insurgents sat comfortably at Ghani's desk.
Why did the Afghan republic collapse so completely and so quickly, spurring tens of thousands of desperate people to run to the Kabul airport in hopes of escaping the Taliban's harsh rule and potential retribution? Conventional wisdom says that the U.S.-backed republic fell because the country's government and society were hopelessly corrupt, and its values were incompatible with democracy. In other words, Afghanistan was ungovernable and would always be a lost cause for the outside world—a graveyard of empires.
Such views are widespread and even understandable, but also completely wrong. Rather, the policy choices made by the United States and its partners in Afghanistan over the past twenty years are largely to blame. The international community made many avoidable mistakes in its attempts at state-building. Painting Afghan society with a broad brush only obfuscates missteps made by those in power—in both Washington and Kabul. Unless there is soul searching about what went wrong, the international community and the United States are likely to repeat the same mistakes somewhere else.
In April 2021, U.S. president Joseph Biden announced that the United States would leave Afghanistan by 11 September 2021. This would end the long drawdown initiated by President Barack Obama, who in December 2009 announced a temporary military and civilian surge and promised to begin withdrawing troops in 2011. Despite the surge, the security situation in the country worsened, and the Taliban movement was emboldened as it had made territorial gains throughout the countryside. In hopes of brokering a negotiated end to the war, Obama began informal negotiations with the Taliban to find a political solution to the quagmire. His successor, Donald Trump, was determined to leave Afghanistan completely, and his administration engaged the Taliban in formal negotiations, culminating in the February 2020 Doha Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan. The Taliban agreed to...