America’s Role in the Taliban Takeover

Afghan refugees waiting inside Hangar 5 at Ramstein Air Base in Germany on September 8, 2021. [AFP/Oliver Douliery]

The U.S. military officially left Afghanistan last week after nearly 20 years of occupation, ceding control of the country to the Taliban and ushering in an uncertain future for the Afghan people. Evacuation efforts flew more than 123,000 civilians out of the country, but also left behind thousands of Afghan citizens who were aligned with the U.S., and up to 200 Americans, according to Reuters.

Ahead of the Aug. 31 deadline, AJ+ senior producer Mara Van Ells interviewed journalist Azmat Khan about the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, a takeover made easier by widespread suffering under American occupation and American-backed governments.

“There have been young children who have never known a moment's peace,” Khan says of America’s longest war. “Who've spent their entire lives perhaps sitting between an Afghan national army base and the Taliban. They've lived on the frontlines of this war their entire lives. And for many, all they want is a life free of war.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

“People who we don't hear from have been besieged by the war”

In the more rural parts of Afghanistan – where about three-quarters of the population lives – Khan noted that people have experienced civilian deaths regularly, including those of children. Her own reporting has led her to believe that most civilian casualties have never been reported.

“They've been besieged by airstrikes. In 2019, the United States carried out more airstrikes in Afghanistan than in any previous year of the war, and most Americans wouldn't know that based on media coverage … but it has really scaled up and ramped up, particularly as negotiations were happening,” Khan said.

Referring to her 2015 investigation into Afghanistan’s “ghost schools,” Khan said, “I found that at almost every level of this reconstruction and nation-building process, there were incredible amounts of corruption and pilfering of funds, but also the United States and its partners partnering with abusive actors on the ground.”

“We very rarely hear from people in these [rural] areas, but they've suffered some of the highest civilian losses and human costs of this war,” Khan said. This suffering, combined with the Afghan army's human rights abuses, meant that many people didn't trust or feel represented by the existing government.

“There are so many people who are being left behind”

“There are so many people who partnered with the Americans, whom the United States could have worked to get out of the country faster and sooner, who are being left behind,” Khan said. “People who face serious threats, not just from the Taliban for the work that they did with Americans, but people like young Afghan women in Kabul and major urban centers who’ve become journalists, who've become actresses and musicians, and do the kind of work that the Taliban, during its original era, really repressed. And so you're seeing women and girls not just fearing for their livelihoods and their careers, but for their lives themselves.”

“The American public doesn't really know that that war is happening”

Khan notes that “when American soldiers aren't losing their lives in war – which is a very good thing, to lower those human costs – the American public doesn't really know that that war is happening.” She pointed out that in 2019, when the intensity of U.S. bombings in Afghanistan was at its height, Americans were seeing little news coverage of the war itself.

“That means that Americans weren't really debating whether this war should be happening, weren't really confronting its cost, not just to Americans, but the costs to foreign populations, foreign populations to whom we have now essentially shifted the human costs of war.”

Watch Van Ells’ video interview with Khan on the reasons the Taliban was able to take over Afghanistan so quickly here.