Three years ago today, the last plane carrying U.S. troops took off from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul just before midnight local time, marking the official end of America’s longest war.
The U.S.-backed Afghan government had collapsed two weeks earlier, and American troops had spent the last half of August 2021 engaged in a heroic effort to save more than 124,000 Afghans and Americans from the Taliban. A terrorist attack on the airport’s Abbey Gate killed 13 U.S. troops.
After the fall of Kabul, veterans groups quickly sprang into action to rescue Afghan allies from the Taliban. Their efforts saved countless lives, but veterans continue to be anguished over those left behind, and this has defined how they remember the conflict. For the third anniversary of the withdrawal, Task & Purpose spoke to veterans about the final days of the Afghanistan war and its aftermath.
Withdrawal deadline
The disaster in Kabul began, like nearly all elements of the war, with a President and a string of generals announcing a change of strategy. After taking office in 2017, President Donald Trump initially approved more U.S. troops for Afghanistan while signaling that he intended to end the war. His administration eventually signed the Doha Agreement with the Taliban, calling for all US troops to leave the country by May 2021. In the final months of his administration, Trump accelerated the American military drawdown in Afghanistan even as the Taliban increased attacks against Afghan security forces.
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When President Joe Biden took office, he pushed forward with Trump’s intended withdrawal, pegging Sept. 11, 2021, as a deadline.
But while the military followed the orders of both presidents by beginning to shut bases and fly home, both administrations appeared blind to Afghans. Serious efforts to evacuate Afghans who had worked with Americans did not begin until late July, as American and allied forces were already fleeing toward a final stand in Kabul. Only 1,200 Afghans had been relocated to Fort Lee Virginia, by July 31, 2021.
For many Afghanistan War veterans, the chaotic withdrawal from the country overshadows all the previous phases of the conflict. The trauma of trying to help Afghans flee the Taliban is still raw three years later.
‘We could have done more’
Marine veteran Peter Lucier has spent the last three years volunteering and working for groups that help resettle Afghans. He has worked with Afghans directly and put them in contact with the resources that they need.
Despite his efforts to help Afghans in danger, Lucier faults himself for not getting involved with the issue long before the Taliban captured Kabul.
“We all could have been doing more sooner,” Lucier told Task & Purpose. “And there were certainly people saying that it needed to be done. In an age where it feels like accountability doesn’t often happen and people don’t ever own it at any level, it’s important for me to say: ‘Hey, me and a lot of other people also from top to bottom could have been more proactive earlier and maybe would have made a difference.’”
Lucier enlisted in the Marines in 2008 and deployed to Afghanistan from October 2011 to May 2012. He then spent many years advocating for the Afghanistan War to come to an end.
As part of his advocacy efforts, he crossed paths with groups in 2015 and 2016 who were trying to help Afghan allies secure Special immigrant Visas so they could come to the United States, Lucier said.
“I remember seeing those people before any of this became urgent, and I can remember thinking: ‘Oh man, that seems super important; I don’t know if I have the stomach and willpower and the patience for it,’” Lucier recalled. “I am super grateful for those people, but what an uphill battle.”
When Kabul fell, Lucier went back to some of those same groups, and he felt a sense of guilt for not taking up their cause earlier.
“They were right about so many things,” he said. “Just seeing those people, I felt like I owed them an apology. I just remember every time seeing them and just wanting to say: Man, you guys were voices in the wilderness for so long and people like me didn’t even take them seriously enough, or we could have done more.”
Lucier said one of his major objections to the way the Afghanistan War was conducted was that he felt no senior U.S. leaders were ever held accountable or accepted responsibility when things went wrong.
That desire to hold someone accountable is what drives him to continue to feel that he fell short by not helping Afghans to get to safety before August 2021. He also feels odd when people thank him for his assistance because he believes he came late to the game.
“Was I as responsible as whomever for the botched withdrawal?” he said. “No, but that doesn’t mean some folks didn’t try to speak out about it and that I didn’t take them seriously.”
Moral injury
The Taliban promised not to retaliate against vanquished troops and police, but the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction noted in its most recent report that the Taliban continue to hunt down, torture, and kill members of the former government and security forces and their families.
“I believe that the Biden legacy will always be, not the departure from Afghanistan, but the abandonment of a 20-year ally and a massive moral injury on the men and women that served voluntarily for two decades”, said retired Army Lt. Col. Scott Mann, a former Green Beret who founded Task Force Pineapple, a nonprofit group that has evacuated about 1,000 Afghans and Americans.
Volunteers cashed in their retirement savings and Mann’s own consulting business suffered so he could finance and carry out these rescues. They worked 18-20 hours a day during August and September 2021. Some continue to answer pleas for help from Afghanistan.
“How do you hang up the phone?” Mann told Task & Purpose.
Mann said the reason why Task Force Pineapple and other volunteer groups became involved in efforts to save Afghan allies is simple: No one else was coming to their rescue.
“These were our friends,” Mann said. “In many cases, these were people whom we had served with and in many cases stood up for us. Some of us were around because of them. And now they were just being abandoned, left on the side of the road to be executed and hunted. It just went against every moral fiber that we had been taught as special operators, as Green Berets, as Marines, that you just don’t leave someone behind like that. It was just something that many, many veterans and other volunteers could not live with.”
Mann echoed the frustrations of many veterans of the post-9/11 wars, who feel their sacrifices have largely been ignored by the U.S. government. These pains are exacerbated, he said, by the U.S. government’s failure to take responsibility for the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, which Mann described as “a massive slap in the face.”
Whatever else Biden has accomplished, Mann believes that the Afghanistan withdrawal will always define his presidency.
“From the [Global War on Terrorism] generation, there is no quarter on this,” Mann said. “He will wear this around his neck with our generation for as long as his name is spoken.”
Lessons from Afghanistan
While Afghanistan was an “unmitigated disaster with the number of people left behind,” allies in the U.S., and Biden officials in particular, have learned and gotten better at conducting evacuations, said Army veteran Alex Plitsas, a board member of the Special Operations Association of America, who has helped to organize rescues from Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza.
“I think the administration has gotten better at the evacuation of folks when there’s a deliberate plan to do so,” Plitsas told Task & Purpose.
In subsequent excavations in Ukraine, Sudan, Israel, and Gaza, both the Defense and State Departments were able to anticipate the crises and form a better relationship with non-governmental organizations, Plitsas said.
“I think the State Department has taken into account some of the lessons learned from Afghanistan: a little bit more detailed planning and a little bit better coordination ahead of time, where possible,” Plitsas said. “There’s still a lot more to go.”
Three years after the withdrawal, Plitsas is still helping Afghans resettle in the United States. The current situation is “bittersweet,” he said.
“We have been able to successfully evacuate a number of Afghan allies and their families to the United States in line with our moral and legal promise to those who stood by us on the battlefield,” Plitsas said. “But, the bitter part is that there are still over 100,000 people left behind in Afghanistan who have yet to make it to the United States.”
Other Afghans were able to reach safety but members of their families were left behind, he said. Most of those family members are women, who no longer have the opportunity to get an education and they are forced to be covered from head to toe and be accompanied by a male relative.
“The women have really borne the brunt of our withdrawal in terms of impact on their daily lives, and it’s been horrific and tragic to watch,” Plitsas said.
Afghans still coming to the United States
Though the final flights lifting off from HKIA left veterans and the world at large with a dark picture of a final departure, the U.S.-aided evacuation of Afghans has continued. As of July, a senior administration official told Task & Purpose, the total number of Afghans relocated under U.S. auspices was about 160,000, half of whom had been able to leave the country since the fall of Kabul.
Every month, thousands of Afghans who have worked with or for the American government arrive in communities across the United States, including former interpreters and female pilots with the former Afghan Air Force, the senior administration official said. The timeline for processing Afghan visa holders and refugees, which used to take years, has also been significantly shortened to weeks or months.
One reason the Biden administration does not talk about Afghan resettlement is it does not want to disrupt the program, the senior administration official said.
More Special Immigrant Visas have been issued to Afghans during the Biden administration than all previous administrations since the program’s inception in 2009, said Navy veteran Shawn VanDiver, founder of #AfghanEvac, a non-profit group that manages a coalition of more than 250 organizations to relocate and resettle Afghans.
Ironically, VanDiver said, the more successful the evacuations have been, the less publicity officials and veterans have sought for the efforts, believing that jubilant press coverage of Afghans who “make it out” can boomerang back on others still in Afghanistan. But the Biden administration has been committed to doing the “quiet work” needed to keep its promise to America’s wartime allies, VanDiver told Task & Purpose.
“When I say the Biden administration has leaned in on this, I mean they have leaned all the way the f—k in,” VanDiver said. “He’s been doing extraordinary s—t, and they have not taken the political win of saying, ‘Look at what we‘ve done.’ That’s honorable.”
Despite the ugly and painful exit, VanDiver said he still believes that withdrawing from Afghanistan was the right decision. He also praised the Biden administration for the “extraordinary lengths” that they have gone to resettle 160,000 Afghan refugees in the United States.
“He has made a point over the last three years that from that chaos, they built an operation that honors our commitment,” VanDiver said. “When he called me in August 2022, he made a commitment to me that #AfghanEvac would never suffer from a lack of access; they would always hear us; and they were committed to seeing this through.”
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