The United States initiated its final military withdrawal from Afghanistan in April 2021, triggering the rapid collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul and the return of Taliban rule. This sudden security vacuum allowed Taliban fighters to seize provincial capitals within weeks, culminating in the chaotic evacuation of approximately 120,000 people from Kabul International Airport by August 15, 2021.
The swift disintegration of the Afghan national forces exposed deep-seated structural vulnerabilities and a lack of local legitimacy that decades of Western security assistance failed to resolve. Consequently, the abrupt departure of the remaining 2,500 American troops marked the inglorious end of a twenty-year conflict, leaving the country under fundamentalist control and raising critical questions about the long-term strategic costs of Washington's longest war. As the international community grapples with the fallout, the legacy of collective forgetting threatens to obscure the vital lessons of this military intervention.
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