What’s happening in Afghanistan?

Two years ago, the Taliban marched into Kabul, the Afghan government collapsed, and the United States, already scheduled to depart on August 31, rushed to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies. Not everyone who should have gotten on those planes did, but the US airlifted some 120,000 people in two chaotic weeks.

About 78,000 were Afghans, who arrived in the US as part of Operation Allies Welcome. They were vetted, screened, and stayed for weeks, sometimes months, at US military bases, before they were resettled in communities around the country. Most of these arrivals were granted humanitarian parole, a two-year temporary status.

Saara, who works for an international agency in Afghanistan, said that on the December day the Taliban banned women from working for nongovernmental organizations, she thought: Just “kill us at once.”

This was the latest of the Taliban’s edicts to restrict the rights of women, like banning girls from attending secondary school in March, and then universities in December, and now taking away their jobs. They “have a knife,” she said of the Taliban. “It is not a knife which is able to cut something at once; you need to try again and again with a knife to cut something. They are cutting us like this. So we said: ‘They must kill us at once.’”

More than five months after the fall of Kabul, the Afghan economy is on the brink of collapse, leaving millions of people at risk of extreme poverty or starvation. One major culprit: the US decision to halt aid to the country and freeze billions in Afghan government funds.

The scope of the humanitarian crisis facing Afghanistan is massive: According to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “virtually every man, woman and child in Afghanistan could face acute poverty” without massive investment from the international community and a concerted effort to rebuild the nation’s economy.

One set of clothes took Enayatullah Sadat from Nimroz province, in the southwest of Afghanistan, to Fort Pickett, a United States military base in Blackstone, Virginia.

He wore the outfit in Nimroz, after he delivered the last drips of intel to the Afghan Air Force on the Taliban’s position. He wore it as he drove toward Kabul on roads blasted by IEDs. He wore the outfit for the five days it took him to fight his way inside the Hamid Karzai International Airport. He wore it on his flight to Qatar, and then started to feel shy about the way he might smell on another crowded flight to Washington, DC. He wore it when he waited for hours in line for his first meal at Fort Pickett. Another day, about 15 in total, in the same clothes: a perahan tunban, traditional Afghan clothes consisting of a long dress shirt and trousers, and reddish sandals, gray foam leaking from the heel.

The Taliban announced an interim government last week, as the movement transitions from insurgency to rulers of Afghanistan.

The top-level cabinet positions are all male, many of them staffed by Taliban loyalists, including those who had positions in the 1990s Taliban. It is a sign that, despite promises of some moderation, the new Taliban looks a lot like the old Taliban.

On August 15, 2021, the Taliban took over Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. The Afghan president fled the country. Almost all of Afghanistan is now under Taliban control. It marks the end of an era: America’s longest war is now over, and America lost. It happened fast, stunning the world and leaving many in the country racing to find an exit. But even among those surprised by the way the end played out, many knew the war was destined to end badly. According to some experts, the seeds of disaster were planted back at the war’s very beginning.

Soon after the American war in Afghanistan began in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the US government struggled to answer exactly why the military was there. In the very beginning, the goal was relatively clear: to capture the perpetrator of the attacks, Osama bin Laden. But almost immediately, the goals became murkier and more complicated.

Afghanistan wasn’t just America’s 20-year war. It also belonged to US allies.

“This has been above all a catastrophe for the Afghan people. It’s a failure of the Western world and it’s a game changer for international relations,” the European Union’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell told an Italian newspaper Monday, according to the Washington Post.

Inside a clinic in eastern Afghanistan, a nine-months-pregnant Afghan woman shivered on an old metal bed as an Afghan midwife examined her. It was 2012, and the war in Afghanistan had already been going on for 11 years. The woman had just traveled from an outlying village along the Pakistan border, seeking a safe place to deliver her third child. After repeated miscarriages, her family was determined to make their way to the Afghan government’s sponsored clinic at the district’s center, where they had heard news about better maternal outcomes.

Part of my job, as a Cultural Support Team (CST) leader with special operations in the US military, was to inform families like theirs about the clinic. The midwives there could facilitate a safer delivery that might not have happened otherwise, like when the Taliban was in power during the 1990s. The pregnant patient would spend several days at the clinic, waiting out her delivery and returning to her village after recovering from labor.

The United States issued a warning this week amid the crush and chaos at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan: Avoid the area because of a possible ISIS terror attack.

On Thursday, the threat bore out. The full tragedy of the attack is still unclear, but at least 170 Afghans and 13 US service members were killed in an explosion around Kabul airport, the deadliest day for American combat troops in Afghanistan in a decade.

A vast majority of Americans across the political spectrum — 90 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Republicans — support resettling vulnerable Afghans in the US amid the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. The Biden administration is surging resources to make that happen, speeding up visa processing for Afghans employed by the US government to support the 20-year war effort and trying to secure humanitarian aid for refugees. But it still seems as though many of them could face a monthslong wait before they can start a new life in the US.

Roughly 88,000 people who worked for the US government during the war, as well as their family members, are in the application pipeline for special immigrant visas (SIVs). Some are being sent to other countries to wait; others who are further along in the process are being sent to the US directly for resettlement.

The biggest question since the Taliban recaptured Kabul on August 15 has been whether the group’s return to power means the same thing for Afghans that it did 25 years ago.

The last time the Taliban controlled all of Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, was marked by brutal oppression, particularly of minorities and women. Their proclivity for violence, which continued throughout their post-9/11 resurgence as an insurgent force, has resulted in civilian massacres, human trafficking, and an environment dictated by fear.

Afghanistan, after the Taliban takeover, is a waiting game. And for Afghan women, the waiting game is agonizing.

The last time the Taliban held power, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, repression was a feature of their rule. This was especially true for women. Girls could not attend school; women could not hold jobs or leave their homes without a male relative accompanying them. Those who defied the Taliban’s directives and their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam were punished, often brutally, with floggings or beatings.

The reason we should care about refugees is because they are people.

But, unfortunately, for many people that is an insufficient moral claim. Even for the tens of thousands of Afghan people who put their lives in jeopardy working alongside the US military over the past 20 years. So let’s put it another way: Evidence shows that accepting refugees benefits the host country too.

The United States’ decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan closes a 20-year chapter between the two countries. But US intervention in Afghanistan far predates the 21st century, stretching back decades.

In the weeks and months ahead, there are going to be a lot of questions about what’s next for Afghanistan, including how the US approaches it. But contemplating what happens going forward also means looking at the past, including the ways American involvement has shaped Afghan politics and life for more than 50 years.

Four presidential administrations share, in varying degrees, the blame for the Taliban’s sudden takeover of Afghanistan — a development that brought the United States’ 20-year war in the country to an ignominious conclusion.

But watch cable news and you’d think some of the retired officials who helped orchestrate and continue the war had learned nothing.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the US took in more than 100,000 Vietnamese refugees in less than a year, a policy the government desperately needs to learn from as it deals with the impact of withdrawing from Afghanistan.

With the Taliban regaining power, thousands of Afghans are poised to flee a regime that’s expected to be not only more repressive than the previous government but also more hostile to US allies in the country.

As the Taliban seize control of Afghanistan for the first time in over 20 years, social media companies are in a precarious situation: They have to figure out how to handle what was once considered an insurgent, terrorist-affiliated group potentially governing an entire country.

These days, political leaders use social media as a critical means to communicate and mobilize support. It’s not just personal accounts of politicians that depend on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but also the official accounts for government agencies and infrastructure. And if the Taliban become an internationally recognized government — no matter how awful its track record on supporting terrorism abroad and inflicting human rights abuses on the Afghan people — these companies must grapple with a difficult set of questions. Do they continue treating the Taliban as a dangerous organization, or give them the chance to run their newly reformed government on social media?

To understand President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan against the advice of the US military establishment, you need to go back to a debate that played out more than a decade ago, during the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

In 2009, the new Obama administration debated whether to “surge” troop levels in Afghanistan after nearly eight years of war had failed to quell the insurgency from the overthrown Taliban forces. Top generals asked early that year for 17,000 more US troops and then, having gotten those, asked for an additional 40,000 to try to weaken the Taliban and strengthen the Afghan government.

Nearly a year and a half before the Taliban swept through Afghanistan, seizing control of the country for the first time since 2001, it reached a peace deal with the United States in Doha, Qatar.

That process gave the ideologically strident Islamist militant group a public venue to appear as “very well-dressed people, with smartphones, speaking very diplomatically in front of the international media,” said Sher Jan Ahmadzai, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. For the Taliban, it offered a glimpse of international legitimacy, something that it lacked when the group took over Afghanistan in the late 1990s.

After the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, many Afghans who aided the United States’ 20-year war effort are looking to flee.

Some Afghan allies have been told by US authorities not to go to the Kabul airport, currently the only available exit point, and to shelter in place until instructed otherwise. Many have shown up at the airport nonetheless, desperately trying to escape, even though civilian flights were temporarily suspended, with some even clinging onto a US military aircraft as it was mid-takeoff.

Editor’s note, August 15, 1:30 pm: The Taliban took control of Afghanistan’s capital city, Kabul, on Sunday as the country’s president fled and the government collapsed. Read the latest coverage here.

The Taliban are rapidly overrunning large parts of Afghanistan.

As the US withdraws from Afghanistan, time is running out to save thousands of Afghans who helped American forces during the two-decade war and now face retribution from the rapidly advancing Taliban.

The Biden administration hatched an eleventh-hour plan, known as Operation Allies Refuge, to evacuate thousands of Afghan interpreters as well as other employees of the US government or allied forces, and their families. An initial group of about 2,500 started arriving at Fort Lee in northern Virginia on July 30.

The Biden administration will begin evacuating thousands of Afghans who worked for the US government later this month, ahead of an August 31 deadline for the end of US military operations in Afghanistan.

Current and former Afghan translators, interpreters, and others who have worked with the US government in Afghanistan are facing deadly danger as the US drawdown continues and the Taliban reclaims territory once controlled by Afghan and coalition forces.

“Is the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan inevitable?”

That’s the question a reporter put to President Joe Biden this week at a press conference on the US’s drawdown in Afghanistan.