Eight years ago I visited the newly built Afghan National Defence university in Qargha, outside Kabul, for a ceremony at which NATO formally handed over military control to Afghan forces. My battered notebook says that Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then NATO’s secretary-general, stood alongside Hamid Karzai, then the country’s president, and praised the “formidable forces” who would “guarantee the security of Afghanistan” in years to come. It did not quite work out like that.
I thought of that moment as I listened to a speech by President Joe Biden on April 14th. He announced that America would remove every last soldier from Afghanistan by September 11th—symbolically, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that provoked America’s invasion. “I’m now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan,” he said. “I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.” Our piece this week explains what might follow.
It is hard to describe America’s departure as anything but a defeat. Its causes will be debated for years. Neighbouring Pakistan played both sides, allowing its ports to be used for supplying the war while also sheltering and supporting the Taliban. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 pulled resources and attention away from Afghanistan at a crucial moment. America and its allies built a highly centralised state, concentrating power in Kabul. Local warlords were allowed to get away with murder, quite literally. And as my colleague Daniel Knowles reported in May 2019, the Taliban often deal with local disputes more brutally than the government—“but much less corruptly.”
The Taliban will not necessarily sweep through the country in weeks, come September, but they do have the upper hand. “They have encircled key cities across the country,” notes one recent piece of analysis , “capturing police checkpoints and controlling the roads ever closer to cities like Kandahar and Kabul, once bastions of government control.” Afghan security forces are large on paper, but weak in practice, with little ability to supply remote outposts or evacuate casualties by air. Without American planes above, the Taliban can mass in larger formations. Even with a steady supply of American cash, the government of Ashraf Ghani will struggle to keep its grip on power.
Countries such as China, India, Iran, Pakistan and Russia will not sit idly by if the Afghan state begins to fall apart. Spy agencies from those countries, and more, will funnel cash and arms to different factions, much as they did during Afghanistan’s civil war in the 1990s. That may even present opportunities for savvy diplomacy: one former official suggests that America, free from logistical dependence on Pakistan, should back India and “play off the Russians against the Chinese”—for they too may have conflicting interests in the country. American soldiers may soon have seen the last of Afghanistan. American diplomats and intelligence officers will be busy for a while yet. | 
