In America: Four Years From Withdrawal - Afghanistan’s Descent into Chaos and America’s Broken Promises

uena Vista Images

The US, once a self-proclaimed beacon of hope for many Afghans, now appears to be turning a blind eye to their suffering. Has America gone soft on its war against terror, or did it lose the war and is too ashamed to admit it?

Abandoned Arms & Escalating Violence

When the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, it left behind an estimated $7 billion in military equipment. This included 78 aircraft, 40,000 vehicles, and 300,000 weapons—now fueling insurgencies across South Asia. A Washington Post investigation revealed that American-made rifles, night-vision devices, and machine guns have flooded Pakistani black markets, arming groups like the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) and Baloch separatists. “They have the latest American-made weapons,” said Ahmad Hussain, a Pakistani special forces constable injured in a 2024 attack. “They could see us, but we couldn’t see them.”

The Taliban, now custodians of this arsenal, have bluntly refused U.S. demands to return the equipment. “These are the assets of the state of Afghanistan,” declared Taliban spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi in an interview with CBS News. “No one can take them away from us.” President Donald Trump, who negotiated the 2020 Doha Agreement that set the withdrawal timeline, has since lambasted the Biden administration for the abandoned gear: “We left billions, tens of billions of dollars’ worth of equipment behind…all the top-of-the-line stuff.” Yet critics, like one senior Pentagon official, said, “This was a terrible deal. It was deeply injurious to US interests, let alone ruinous to Afghan interests.” Others like Senators Lindsey Graham and Jeanne Shaheen also echo the sentiment. Trump’s deal with the Taliban, which excluded the Afghan government and freed 5,000 imprisoned fighters, paved the way for the regime’s swift takeover.

The Systematic Erasure of Afghan Women

United Nations experts have labeled Afghanistan under the Taliban’s rule as a state of “gender apartheid,” with over 100 edicts virtually erasing women from public life. Girls are banned from education beyond sixth grade, women are barred from most jobs, and strict dress codes and male guardianship laws confine them to their homes. “It is a state of hopelessness,” said one anonymous female lawyer based in the country to the Atlantic Council, “The ones who can afford [to] flee, and the ones who cannot, stay and suffer”.

UN Women Executive Director Sima Sami Bahous highlighted the mental health crisis: 90% of young Afghan women report poor mental health, with suicide rates spiking under the Taliban’s draconian policies. Despite global condemnation, the international community has failed to hold the regime accountable. The UN’s Doha III meeting in 2024 excluded Afghan women from discussions, prioritizing economic talks over human rights—a move activists like Shahrbanu Haidari said, “[This] has deeply unsettled many women in Afghanistan and concerned individuals globally”.

Abandoning The Afghans Who Helped America

The U.S. withdrawal also shattered promises to protect Afghan allies. In April 2025, the Trump administration revoked Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for over 9,000 Afghans, exposing them to deportation to a country where collaboration with Western forces is a death sentence. “The conditions on the ground haven’t improved—they’ve worsened,” Shawn VanDiver, president of AfghanEvac, told NPR. “This decision throws our allies into harmful uncertainty”.

Andrew Sullivan of No One Left Behind told NPR that many Afghans eligible for Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) remain in bureaucratic limbo: “They completed substantial service to U.S. national security, yet are still in processing…” He, like VanDiver, believes the red tape in question is mostly due to the shoddy job that the US did while pulling out of Afghanistan. "This decision throws our allies into harmful uncertainty,” Sullivan said.

America’s Pattern of Broken Promises

The abandonment of Afghanistan echoes a troubling trend in U.S. foreign policy. In 1994, Ukraine relinquished its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances under the Budapest Memorandum. Yet when Russia invaded in 2022, the U.S. under Trump resisted military aid, with the former president dismissing Ukraine’s plight as “not our fight,” while lambasting the president of a warring nation in the Oval Office. All of this while claiming that Zelenskyy is “the greatest salesman of all time,” and criticizing the scale of America’s fiscal support to Ukraine to fight off the invaders, Russia. This is a matter which, according to some, under the Trump regime is under question itself, as Ukraine has been called the aggressor, repeatedly.

For America: A Moral Reckoning?

Four years after the withdrawal, Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis deepens. Women die in childbirth daily, the WHO warns of collapsing healthcare, and U.S.-armed militants destabilize Pakistan. Its neighbors are in Southeast Asia. Yet Washington’s response has oscillated between apathy and performative demands for accountability.

As Biden asserted in 2021, “The fundamental obligation of a president is to defend and protect America—not against threats of 2001, but against the threats of 2021 and tomorrow”. But for the 15 million Afghan women living under Taliban rule—and the allies America vowed to protect—this rhetoric rings hollow. The world watches as the U.S. grapples with the legacy of a war it could neither win nor ethically end.

As one anonymous female journalist told the Atlantic Council’s Horia Mosadiq, “In Afghanistan, there is only darkness and hopelessness now—nothing else”. The only question remains whether Trump’s America will see it too. Or will it let the women of Afghanistan suffer in silence and darkness?