Like many veterans of America’s post-9/11 wars, I started getting a flurry of WhatsApp messages and calls five years ago this week. Afghan interpreters were reaching out, frantically, to get those they loved on a plane to America before their country fell to the Taliban. Seemingly overnight, the Afghan government and armed forces were collapsing, as the United States conducted the final withdrawal announced by then-President Joe Biden four months earlier. The resulting chaos would be the first crisis of his administration, one that would permanently handicap the president’s approval rating and agenda.
Five years and countless crises later, it is clear that Biden made a necessary and ultimately sound decision.
The speed of the Taliban reconquest in 2021 shocked the world. The Taliban began a general offensive that May and provincial capitals fell like dominoes. In most places, Afghan National Security Forces soldiers and policemen simply put down their weapons and went home, in a manner wholly consistent with centuries of internecine Afghan tribal warfare. The failure to anticipate and plan for this possibility, especially given that the exact same thing had happened to the Taliban 20 years prior, spoke to how little U.S. soldiers, spies, and policymakers ever understood the country.
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