How America Failed its Afghan Allies
The Only War America Ever Agreed On
On September 11, 2001, nineteen men, trained in camps run by al-Qaeda under the protection of Afghanistan's Taliban government, murdered 3,000 people on American soil. The Taliban was given the chance to hand over Osama bin Laden and dismantle the camps. It refused, and three days later, with bodies still being pulled from the rubble, Congress authorized the use of military force against the perpetrators and anyone who harbored them by a vote of 420 to 1 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate. NATO invoked Article 5, its mutual-defense clause, for the first and only time in the alliance's history, treating an attack on New York and Washington DC as an attack on every nation from Warsaw to Lisbon. Not only was this war unanimously agreed upon, but it had a single, quite achievable purpose: deny al-Qaeda a safehaven.
And yet only eight years after that sanctuary was destroyed, the administration that inherited the war, the Obama administration, was already announcing the exact date that the door for Al-Qaeda’s sanctuary would reopen. In December 2009, at West Point, Barack Obama told the country he was sending 30,000 more Americans into Afghanistan. In the very same speech, he told the Taliban exactly how long they needed to wait. "After 18 months," he said, "our troops will begin to come home." A few paragraphs later, in case anyone had missed it, he gave the actual date: July 2011. Robert Gates, Obama’s Secretary of Defense, would later write that in meetings on the subject, the president was heard to say his poll numbers would be stronger if he took issue with the military over Afghanistan policy. The generals had asked for 40,000 troops. So, he gave them 30,000 and accompanied that insufficient surge with a countdown clock.
By the spring of 2011, the president lost the will to fight. That June, Barack Obama ordered a drawdown pace so aggressive that General John Allen, nominated to command coalition forces, was asked under oath before the Senate Armed Services Committee whether it matched what his predecessor, General Petraeus, had recommended.
General Allen answered: "It was not.”
It was a more aggressive withdrawal than any option the military had put on the table. The timeline meant American forces would have to abandon offensive operations in eastern Afghanistan before the 2012 fighting season even began. And conveniently, the surge troops would be coming home just in time for President Obama's 2012 reelection campaign. By 2015, Taliban and al-Qaeda affiliates were resurging across the country. ISIS had opened a franchise. And worst of all, none of this was a secret to anybody.
Starting in 2008 and 2009, Congress passed the Special Immigrant Visa program, because interpreters, drivers, and embassy staff who put their faces next to American troops had painted a target on their families, and the United States, out of respect for its allies, owed them a way out. Congress mandated in 2013 that these applications be processed within nine months. That standard has never once been met, by any administration. It was already failing under President Obama. It got worse under President Trump, when the average wait climbed past three years. By the time Kabul fell in August 2021, roughly 18,000 principal applicants and 53,000 individual family members were still sitting in the pipeline.
Some of them had been waiting since before Obama left office.
And our government was surprised when the people who we promised to protect were still standing on the tarmac when the plane left without them.
The Exit Plan
In February 2020, the Trump administration signed an agreement with the Taliban in Doha that had at least the shape of a serious document. The Trump administration hoped to accomplish a withdrawal tied to verified Taliban conduct, rather than an unconditional withdrawal date carved into stone. Unfortunately, the Trump administration did not hold to this framework. Within months, President Trump was unilaterally ordering troop levels down past what Doha itself required (from 8,600 to 4,500, then down to 2,500) all while the Taliban was violating the agreement's terms. Trump's lead negotiator and his own military staff would later testify they were blindsided by the pace, with no real interagency process behind it.
Under President Biden, the military recommended that the President maintain a residual force of at least 2,500 troops indefinitely, precisely because the Taliban was not meeting the Doha agreement's terms. Despite these recommendations, President Biden overruled them, set a fixed calendar date, and held to it as the country came apart beneath him, including ordering the evacuation to route through a single airport gate while thousands of vetted allies who had already been told to report there were left to fend for themselves in the crowd outside.
On August 26, 2021, a suicide bomber walked into that crowd at Abbey Gate and killed 13 brave American troops and at least 170 Afghans. Marine Sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews, a scout sniper, testified before Congress under oath that his team believed they had identified the bomber hours before the blast, matching a description they had been given, and that they requested authorization to eliminate the threat. And yet, the chain of command had become so unclear that not a single service member with him could say who actually held the authority to say “Yes” or “No”. "Plain and simple," Vargas-Andrews told the committee, "we were ignored." Tyler lost an arm and a leg in the blast that followed.
Thirteen names came home in flag-draped cases six days later. And they died inside a system that could not tell a 20-year-old sergeant whether or not he was allowed to pull a trigger to save his own life.
Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Darin T. Hoover
Marine Corps Sergeant Johanny Rosario Pichardo
Marine Corps Sergeant Nicole L. Gee
Marine Corps Corporal Hunter Lopez
Marine Corps Corporal Daegan W. Page
Marine Corps Corporal Humberto A. Sanchez
Marine Corps Lance Corporal David L. Espinoza
Marine Corps Lance Corporal Jared M. Schmitz
Marine Corps Lance Corporal Rylee J. McCollum
Marine Corps Lance Corporal Dylan R. Merola
Marine Corps Lance Corporal Kareem M. Nikoui
Army Staff Sergeant Ryan C. Knauss
Navy Hospital Corpsman Third Class Maxton W. Soviak
Afghan Corruption
“But our so-called Afghan allies were corrupt! Why weep for a government that stole from its own people, whose president's own circle sat at the center of a bank fraud that swallowed $900 million meant for one of the poorest nations on earth, whose most powerful commanders answered for massacres with ministries instead of prison cells?”
That’s a fair question, and it deserves a fair answer
The post-2001 Afghan state was, by any honest measure, one of the seven most corrupt governments on earth by 2021. Men like General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a Northern Alliance commander whose forces were responsible for the suffocation deaths of as many as 2,000 Taliban prisoners packed into shipping containers in 2001, and Marshal Mohammed Fahim, who ran the Ministry of Defense and later the vice presidency with a reputation for brutality and graft, were not exceptions to the norm. They were installed at the center of the government, by Washington DC, because they were the men with the guns.
But one ought to measure that record against the client states America is proudest to have kept faith with: Syngman Rhee, who founded South Korea, ran a regime propped up by a “rat hole” aid program, and its founding president was driven from office in 1960 by a popular uprising against an election so blatantly fraudulent that even his own Liberal Party could not make it look honest. In South Vietnam, by the US military's own estimate, roughly a quarter of the entire army's payroll consisted of "ghost soldiers": men dead or deserted, kept on the books so their officers could pocket their salaries. This was the identical fraud, down to the name, that hollowed out Afghanistan's own army rolls in 2021. President Thieu's own wife ran a real-estate fortune built on advance knowledge of government purchases while unpaid soldiers deserted by the thousands. South Vietnam collapsed in 1975 in no small part because its own government had emptied out the army meant to defend it, exactly as Afghanistan's would forty-six years later.
And yet today, South Korea is a prosperous, generally stable democracy, in part because the United States did not walk away from Seoul the moment Rhee's corruption was exposed. The other two (Vietnam and Afghanistan) are not, and in both cases, because Washington DC’s will to act ran out at the exact moment that it mattered the most.
What A Serious Country Owes
Scattered across northern and eastern Afghanistan today are the men that the United States government trained, equipped, and abandoned, soldiers who never surrendered. The Afghanistan Freedom Front, founded by General Yasin Zia, the former Chief of General Staff of the Afghan National Army the United States spent two decades and $8,000,000,000 in equipment building, has claimed over 300 operations against the Taliban since 2022, and more than 200 Taliban fighters killed in the first eight months of 2025 alone. Alongside them, the National Resistance Front, holding out in the Panjshir Valley under Ahmad Massoud, has maintained its own guerilla campaign. Last year, the two forces formalized a political and military union. The United Nations recorded well over 100 resistance attacks in the first seven months of 2025 from the resistance’s concerted efforts.
These are the men we trained, who fought under our advisors, who are still fighting now with none of our support, against an enemy we handed the weapons to leave behind. Our government has broken the only currency that makes an alliance worth anything to the next ally who is asked to take the same risk.
This has to change.
A nation that asks foreigners to risk their lives and those of their families beside American soldiers incurs the same debt it owes its own veterans, and the fact that no administration in the last two decades has maintained its Visa promise is a mark that the establishment simply cannot wipe away.
The NNA believes firmly that America’s promises to defend its allies must have the force of binding law, with a hard processing deadline enforced with the same gravity as a court order. And any future conditions-based withdrawal agreements must bind the administration that signs it and the administration that inherits it alike. America must never again abandon the men who have fought beside it. August 2021 should never happen again, and the men still fighting the Taliban tonight in the mountains, who we once knew by name, deserve to know that this time, we mean it.
