Seyed Jamaluddin Sajjadi, a journalist, wrote exclusively for IRAF: Shortly before midnight on August 31, 2021, the last U.S. soldier boarded a military aircraft and left Afghanistan, bringing an abrupt end to America’s 20-year military presence in the country. The hurried withdrawal paved the way for the collapse of a political and security system that had become deeply dependent on foreign support.
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States entered Afghanistan with the stated objectives of destroying al-Qaeda, combating terrorism and preventing the country from becoming a safe haven for terrorist groups. What began as Operation Enduring Freedom, initially presented as a limited mission to fight those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, evolved into a prolonged war and a far broader intervention in Afghanistan’s political and security structures, ultimately becoming an occupation.
After the fall of the first Taliban government, the United States and its allies launched an ambitious project to establish a new government, rebuild the Afghan army and security forces, strengthen state institutions and create an electoral political system. Yet after two decades, the United States left Afghanistan as the Taliban had entered Kabul — meaning the war ended at virtually the same point where it had begun.
The Last Soldier Leaves; the Taliban Enter
General Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, was the last American service member to board an aircraft and leave Afghanistan on the night of August 31, 2021.
A night-vision image of Donahue boarding a C-17 in the darkness of Hamid Karzai International Airport became one of the defining images of the end of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.
At the time, Donahue was in charge of the evacuation operation at Kabul airport. He had been deployed to Afghanistan on several separate missions since 2002. In the final days of the U.S. presence, he and the forces under his command were responsible for securing the airport and helping oversee the evacuation operation.
After leaving Afghanistan, Donahue was promoted in March 2022 and appointed commander of the U.S. XVIII Airborne Corps. In December 2024, he was promoted to four-star general and appointed commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, while also assuming command of NATO Allied Land Command. The image of him as the last U.S. soldier to leave Afghanistan would later become part of his record as one of the senior commanders of the U.S. military and NATO.
Donahue’s departure and that of the remaining U.S. forces came as Afghanistan’s political and security structures had begun collapsing at extraordinary speed only weeks earlier. Washington completed its evacuation as the Taliban controlled Kabul and large parts of the country, while thousands of Afghans were desperately trying to reach the airport.
A Foreign-Backed Government: Large but Fragile
One of the most important lessons of Afghanistan’s collapse was the gap between the appearance of the Islamic Republic’s state institutions and their deeply hollow and dysfunctional reality.
In its final years, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan had a presidency, parliament, army, police force, judiciary, ministries and an extensive network of government institutions. Yet many of these structures were heavily dependent on foreign resources and support in practice.
Over two decades, the United States and its allies spent billions of dollars building and maintaining these institutions. But much of that investment failed to produce institutions capable of functioning independently and sustaining themselves. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) repeatedly emphasized in its reports that the United States had failed to build a stable, accountable government with broad legitimacy in Afghanistan.
Under such circumstances, the U.S. withdrawal meant more than the departure of foreign troops. It also weakened parts of the financial, security and political system on which the Islamic Republic depended.
This dependence ultimately created a fundamental contradiction: a government that was supposed to take responsibility for the country’s security after the departure of foreign forces still relied on those same foreign forces to maintain its security.
The Collapse That Exposed Everything
The fall of Kabul on August 15, 2021, exposed many of the contradictions that had defined two decades of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
Within weeks, the Taliban had seized large parts of the country and eventually entered Kabul. Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president at the time, left the country without putting up any resistance, and the government structure that the United States had spent two decades building and supporting collapsed within a matter of days.
The speed of the collapse was unexpected for many observers and Afghans. An army of roughly 300,000 personnel, built and trained at a cost of billions of dollars and equipped with modern weapons and military equipment, proved unable to resist the much smaller Taliban force.
But the central issue was never simply the number of troops or the amount of equipment. Afghanistan demonstrated that a large army cannot necessarily become a powerful and independent military force when its command structure is dysfunctional, troop morale is weak, its salaries and logistical support depend on foreign resources, and key military capabilities are supplied from abroad.
In the final days, many Afghan army units surrendered without significant fighting or abandoned their positions. In some areas, local negotiations and agreements with the Taliban replaced military resistance. As the chain of command broke down and confidence in the government’s future disappeared, many soldiers also lost the motivation to continue fighting.
At the same time, the departure of U.S. forces and the reduction of American air, intelligence and logistical support created a vacuum that the Afghan military was not prepared to fill. SIGAR has noted that during the war, U.S. forces provided Afghan troops with support including airstrikes, intelligence, medical evacuation and logistics. This dependence, among other factors, prevented Afghan forces from fully developing independent capabilities.
The fall of Kabul demonstrated that many of the achievements of U.S.-backed state-building in Afghanistan existed largely on paper and, in practice, lacked the resilience to withstand even a short period without external support.
The departure of Ashraf Ghani at a critical moment in the fall of Kabul also became a symbol of the Islamic Republic’s political weakness. A government that was supposed to shape Afghanistan’s future was unable, in its final days, to establish coherent political and military leadership capable of confronting the crisis.
The U.S. withdrawal became the ultimate test of the outcome of two decades of intervention in Afghanistan. The result was the collapse of the government backed by Washington, the return of the Taliban and the rapid disintegration of the country’s political and security structures.
America’s Failure in a War It Had Started
The U.S. military presence, which began in 2001 under the banner of combating terrorism, came to an end after nearly two decades with a bitter and unexpected outcome: the collapse of the government Washington had supported. According to U.S. sources, the operation was the longest military operation conducted by the United States outside its borders.
At the end of Operation Enduring Freedom, the Taliban — the very group the United States had entered Afghanistan to overthrow — once again controlled Kabul. This came after Taliban representatives had sat across the negotiating table from the U.S. special envoy in Doha only months earlier.
From this perspective, the departure of the last American soldier can be seen as the final point in a cycle that began with the September 11 attacks, the military campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and promises to build a stable Afghanistan — and ended 20 years later with the collapse of the republic and the Taliban’s return.
Two decades of foreign presence, billions of dollars in spending, thousands killed and wounded, and an extensive reconstruction effort ultimately failed to prevent the collapse of the political system that the United States had supported.
The end of the U.S. military presence did not mean the end of Afghanistan’s crisis. On the contrary, the withdrawal of foreign forces opened a new chapter in the country’s turmoil — one that has continued with the Taliban’s return, a fundamental transformation of the political system, sweeping social and economic restrictions, a humanitarian crisis, migration and Afghanistan’s international isolation.
