America and the Taliban

This program contains violent imagery and graphic language, which are not suitable for some audiences. Viewer discretion is advised.

Part One

MARTIN SMITH, Correspondent:

In the first weeks after the fall of Kabul, Afghans were adjusting to a new peace. The war was over. The city was relatively safe. But no one was quite sure what would happen next.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Taliban had rolled into Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021. They quickly seized total control.

FEMALE REPORTER:

A stunning turn of events in Kabul started the day with the news that the Taliban fighters were surrounding the city. Now they’re inside the presidential palace.

MALE REPORTER:

Taliban sitting in the president’s desk, some of them lounging elsewhere in the office. This has happened so fast.

MARTIN SMITH:

Immediately after they entered the city, scenes of a mass evacuation were beamed around the world.

MALE REPORTER:

But America and other NATO countries were certainly caught totally off guard. They’re now having to cope with this surge of people desperate to get out of the country from the airport, now the only safe way to escape for those who fear for their lives.

MARTIN SMITH:

Two days after their victory, the Taliban held their first press conference. They promised they would not allow militant groups like Al Qaeda to operate from Afghanistan.

ZABIHULLAH MUJAHID:

[Speaking Pashto] We will not allow our soil to be used against anyone else.

MARTIN SMITH:

Chief government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid also made new promises to the women of Afghanistan.

ZABIHULLAH MUJAHID:

[Speaking Pashto] We respect them. Women will have an active role in all aspects of society where needed. [Speaking Dari] We all know that in medicine, education, police, the legal system and different parts of society, women are needed.

MARTIN SMITH:

Why should the United States trust you?

ZABIHULLAH MUJAHID:

[Speaking Pashto] We’ve fought against the U.S. for 20 years, and proved that what we say is what we do. They should realize this.

MARTIN SMITH:

Over the last 18 months I have come to Afghanistan to meet and interview numerous Taliban officials. Many have never spoken before. This is the story of how they won the war.

MATIULLAH ROHANI:

[Speaking Pashto] These areas are where all the fighting was happening. [The Americans] were conducting airstrikes, and the [Taliban] were killed. But being killed was not a problem for them. They came with the desire to be martyred.

MALE REPORTER:

July was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the war began in 2001.

MARTIN SMITH:

This is also the story of how America’s defeat became inevitable, a story rooted in two decades of mistakes, miscalculations and hubris.

COL. JASON DEMPSEY, U.S. Army, 1993-2015:

Problems had been festering for 20 years. My concern is that people won’t look at what were the real underlying issues that allowed it to collapse so spectacularly.

MARTIN SMITH:

I traveled the length of the country. What I saw was people struggling to shake off decades of conflict. War widows begged in the middle of traffic, often with their children on their laps.

MARTIN SMITH:

Is this pediatrics?

MALE DOCTOR:

Yes, this is our malnutrition department.

MARTIN SMITH:

Childhood malnutrition clinics were packed.

MALE DOCTOR:

This is a 180-bed pediatric ward, but today there were 243 patients.

ANGRY CIVILIAN:

[Speaking Dari] There are no salaries or jobs. They’re asking people to work for free.

MARTIN SMITH:

Jobs were scarce.

ANGRY CIVILIAN 2:

[Speaking Dari] You have frozen our money in the bank. What’s the reason for this? What has this nation ever done to you? You have destroyed the businessmen of this nation.

MARTIN SMITH:

Most people we speak to on the streets don’t have jobs. The health care is weak. You have social problems with women not agreeing with Taliban restrictions. How do you answer all this?

MAULVI ABDUL AHAD TALIB:

[Speaking Pashto] We are not concerned with those issues.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Taliban not only showed little concern, they were busy punishing those who disobeyed their rules. In Afghanistan, justice can be brutal.

KABUL

1996

MALE REPORTER:

On a hill overlooking Kabul, these are Afghanistan’s new soldiers of God, praying, they say, for peace and stability in a country that’s known only conflict for nearly two decades.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Taliban first seized control of Afghanistan in 1996 after years of civil war. The movement was established by veterans of the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s, which lasted a decade and left the country in ruins.

MALE REPORTER:

—where the fear of war is fast being replaced by a fear of repression. It’s symbolized by the white flag of the Taliban militiamen, heavily armed religious students who patrol the streets enforcing their vision of Islamic law.

MARTIN SMITH:

There are two major factions within the Taliban: one centered in Kandahar, the other in eastern Afghanistan along the Pakistani border. The Kandahari faction was led by a reclusive young mullah, Muhammad Omar Mujahid. Omar distinguished himself battling the Soviets. He lost his right eye during a Russian attack.

MULLAH ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF, Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan, 2000-01:

In the beginning of the Taliban I was with him, and I was one of the founders of Taliban at that time.

MARTIN SMITH:

I sat down with one of Omar’s closest associates.

And how did Mullah Omar emerge as your leader?

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

This was a big [discussion] among the mujahedeen at the time, and we chose him as a commander because he was a brave person. But also we chose him as a leader, we call Amir, for all Afghanistan.

MALE REPORTER:

The Taliban have been holding an assembly of mullahs from all over Afghanistan. Mullah Omar was declared to be the amir of all Muslims everywhere. Because this was regarded as a key moment for the Afghan nation, Mullah Omar displayed the holy cloak of the prophet Muhammad to the crowd. Neither the cloak nor the ceremony has ever been filmed before, nor has Mullah Omar.

MARTIN SMITH:

Mullah Omar was extreme in his interpretation of Islam. Imagery depicting humans was forbidden. He ordered the destruction of the giant stone Buddhas of Bamiyan, an archeological treasure almost 1,500 years old. Omar cracked down on alcohol, music and movies. Those who were deemed sinners could be subject to public execution.

Also, in a profoundly fateful move, Mullah Omar gave sanctuary to a wealthy Saudi fugitive, Osama bin Laden, and an Egyptian jihadist, Ayman al-Zawahiri, both of whom then plotted attacks against the West from Afghanistan.

FEMALE REPORTER:

This morning, a U.S. destroyer sits crippled in a Yemen harbor. At least six crew members of the USS Cole are dead.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Two bomb blasts today at the U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were clearly a part of someone’s war against the United States.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Taliban insisted they were innocent.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Still unclear at this hour who our enemy is.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

We were not involved with these attacks. But one thing, clearly, when Osama bin Laden ask asylum from the Taliban, Taliban gave him that.

[Speaking Pashto] We were not terrorists and neither is Osama. America and Russia are the terrorists. They want to rule the world and interfere in everyone’s affairs.

MARC GROSSMAN, U.S. Special Rep. for Afghanistan, 2011-12:

In the days leading up to 9/11, leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan, of course, we offered the Taliban every opportunity to turn Al Qaeda over and to turn Osama bin Laden over. And they said no.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:

Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Justice will be done.

MALE REPORTER:

Unleashing its wrath, America, with help from Britain, has struck at Taliban targets and terrorist training camps across Afghanistan.

MARTIN SMITH:

Within a month of 9/11, the U.S. launched Operation Enduring Freedom.

MALE REPORTER:

Explosions over Kabul, over Kandahar, over Jalalabad.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Taliban’s fall was swift and decisive.

MALE REPORTER:

Now with near breathtaking speed, the takeover of the country’s capital, Kabul—

MARTIN SMITH:

After a month, the Taliban were in full retreat and Mullah Omar was on the run.

MALE REPORTER:

Mullah Omar is thought to be hiding, a $10 million bounty on his head.

MARTIN SMITH:

The U.S. and the rest of the international community now found itself needing to fill a power vacuum. In late November 2001, at a big hotel outside Bonn, Germany, the UN sponsored a conference to determine who would rule the new Afghanistan.

FEMALE REPORTER:

The UN really putting the pressure on Afghan delegates.

MARTIN SMITH:

But the Taliban were excluded.

FEMALE REPORTER:

They keep on urging them, “This is your chance here to come to an agreement. The world is watching you. Don’t blow it.”

MARTIN SMITH:

So at that conference there were a whole slew of Afghan participants invited, from the Northern Alliance to Pakistan-exiled Afghan Pashtuns, Afghans with ties to Iran. No Taliban. Was it ever discussed that perhaps there should be an invitation made to the Taliban to participate?

MARC GROSSMAN:

You know, not to my recollection. I think you have to go back in time and think about how everybody felt at that moment. And of course, the Taliban, connected to Al Qaeda, connected to the 11th of September, I think the general feeling was that they’d been defeated, they were out and we were going to try to do the best we can with the groups that you mentioned.

MARTIN SMITH:

It is customary in postwar situations to invite the vanquished to sit at the table to discuss the future. A decision is made not to invite the Taliban. Was that a mistake?

ZALMAY KHALILZAD, U.S. Amb. to Afghanistan, 2004-05:

I think it may have been too early, in Bonn, because the Talibs hadn’t quite been defeated. There were still pockets of resistance and they regarded themselves as the legitimate government. So for many in the U.S., it was too early.

MARTIN SMITH:

By the end of the conference, Hamid Karzai, a charismatic English-speaking Afghan politician with connections to the CIA, was chosen as Afghanistan’s new interim leader.

But some Taliban leaders were still looking to negotiate a deal, offering to surrender if they could remain in Afghanistan and, quote, “live in dignity.”

FAIZ ZALAND, Prof., Kabul University:

They did not want to go out of Afghanistan to Pakistan or Iran. They wanted to collaborate with the new government of President Karzai, help them, and told them that, “Look, we just want to stay in Afghanistan. Let us live here.”

DONALD RUMSFELD, Secretary of Defense, 2001-06:

If you’re asking would an arrangement with Omar, where he could, quote, “live in dignity” in the Kandahar area or someplace in Afghanistan, be consistent with what I have said, the answer is no, it would not be consistent with what I have said.

STEVE COLL, Author, Ghost Wars:

The answer was firm. The Taliban have no place in a future Afghan government and they should be captured and imprisoned, certainly at the leadership level, whenever possible.

GEORGE W. BUSH:

Terrorists are now scattered—

STEVE COLL:

Bounties were put out. Taliban were chased down.

GEORGE BUSH:

—and in every cave, in every dark corner of that country, we will hunt down the killers and bring them to justice.

MARTIN SMITH:

Among the Taliban arrested was their ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Zaeef, seized by Pakistanis and rendered to U.S. custody. Zaeef says he was beaten.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

When they got me, they beat me until I became unconscious. I don’t know what’s happened to me. My head was broken. My shoulder was broken.

MARTIN SMITH:

What were they trying to find out? What were they asking from you?

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

In the beginning, they were asking me, “Where is Osama bin Laden? Where is Mullah Muhammad Omar?” That’s what they were asking. And three, four days like this, they were shouting, “Where is Mullah Muhammad, or you will be killed.”

MARTIN SMITH:

The Taliban were trying to negotiate some kind of space for themselves to live in Kandahar and Helmand. Why not respond to those entreaties by the Taliban?

GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS, Cmdr., U.S. Central Command, 2008-10:

I think it’s a very valid question. And in my own postmortem of why didn’t things turn out better in Afghanistan, one of the questions that lingers, that hangs over this, is why we did not actually try to incorporate the Taliban into the new Afghanistan.

STEVE COLL:

Counterfactual history is a dangerous exercise. It’s very hard to rerun history and ask, “Could it have been different?” I do think in the 20-year history of this war, if there was an opportunity to prevent the Taliban’s insurgency from gathering force and disrupting the American and NATO project in Afghanistan, that was probably the moment.

MARTIN SMITH:

What the U.S. and its allies didn’t appreciate was that the Taliban had a legitimacy in Afghanistan that the U.S. could never match.

MALE SPEAKER:

[Speaking Pashto] The Taliban have sympathized with us because we are poor.

GEN. DOUGLAS LUTE, Dep. National Security Adviser, 2007-13:

The Taliban had a gravity, especially among the remote areas in the Pashtun south and east.

MALE SPEAKER:

[Speaking Pashto] It’s considered taboo, among us Pashtuns, to let women go to school.

DOUGLAS LUTE:

They competed well against the legitimacy of the Afghan government.

STEVE COLL:

While it seemed outrageous in Washington or London, in southern Afghanistan on the ground, when the Taliban came knocking and said, “We were kicked out unjustly,” they started to find some takers for that view.

GEORGE W. BUSH:

Across the world, we are hunting down the killers one by one. We are winning. And we’re showing them—

MARTIN SMITH:

By 2002, with the Taliban on the run, the Bush administration was essentially declaring victory in Afghanistan and was preparing to fight another war.

GEORGE W. BUSH:

In Iraq, a dictator is building and hiding weapons that could enable him to dominate the Middle East.

DOUGLAS LUTE:

There’s no debate that we did take our eye off the ball. We did it deliberately. We entered another campaign an order of magnitude larger and more difficult than what we were undertaking in Afghanistan. We opened for ourselves a two-front war.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Shock and awe. Hundreds of bombs and cruise missiles ripping into Saddam Hussein’s palaces.

MALE REPORTER:

This was central Baghdad today—

MARTIN SMITH:

With the Americans distracted by Iraq, the Taliban were able to quietly regroup. Mullah Omar’s faction set up headquarters just over the border in Pakistan.

STEVE COLL:

The sanctuary itself was terribly important because it allowed the Taliban to regroup politically and militarily. And they started to do what guerrilla groups do when they prepare for an insurgency: to train, to organize, to choose commanders. The Taliban start thinking about campaigns, objectives. They start to communicate. They start sending messages in to the Afghan people saying, “We’re coming. We’re on our way. We need you to join us.”

HAMID KARZAI:

[Speaking Pashto] We have exact information that in the madrassas of Pakistan young boys are being told to go to Afghanistan and join the jihad.

MARTIN SMITH:

Eight thousand miles away, Mullah Zaeef had spent more than three years in Guantanamo, where the defense department was still trying to firmly establish his connection to Al Qaeda. He says his interrogator assured him the war was over.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

It was actually [an] investigator by the name of Tom. He was a tall guy like you. And he told me, “If you are thinking that the Taliban will emerge again, this is a dream. This will not happen.” This became a part of [an] era.

MARTIN SMITH:

He told you that your movement was history.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

Yeah. Not possible [for] someone to be standing against America.

MARTIN SMITH:

Zaeef was then told he could be released only if he would sign a letter that said he was Al Qaeda.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

He said, “Sign it. This is for you. This is our regulation. You have to sign it.” I told them, I say, “I’m not signing. I do want to be released, but I’m not signing this thing. This is lie.”

MARTIN SMITH:

In the end, Zaeef says he signed the letter but added an amendment stating he was not Al Qaeda. He was released from Guantanamo on Sept. 11, 2005, and returned to Afghanistan the next day.

Over the ensuing years, the Taliban mounted a fierce counteroffensive.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Today, the news is bad.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

There’s been an explosion of violence in Afghanistan, some of the worst fighting since the U.S. helped overthrow the Taliban government.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Pitched battles between NATO and U.S. forces and masked gangs of Taliban fighters are raging daily in Afghanistan.

MALE U.S. SOLDIER:

There’s some ICOM chatter saying that the Taliban are looking at us right now.

Taliban video

MALE NEWSREADER:

The Taliban were never truly rooted out of these hills, and now they’re back. Thousands better armed than ever have organized into large-scale units.

DOUGLAS LUTE:

We began to see an upsurge in Taliban violence centered mostly in the south, so Helmand and Kandahar. And the indicators here were pretty clear. The frequency of roadside bombs, IEDs— improvised explosive devices.

Taliban video

MALE NEWSREADER:

This weekend the Taliban’s leader in hiding, Mullah Omar, released a bold audio recording saying, quote, “Those who thought the Taliban were eliminated were wrong. We control a large part of the country.”

STEVE COLL:

The cables that were coming to Washington from Kabul made clear that the war was going badly. And that in the absence of more resources and more attention, it was going to get a lot worse quickly.

MARTIN SMITH:

Adding to the Taliban’s growing strength was the Haqqani network fighting in Afghanistan’s east, led by another veteran of the anti-Soviet war, Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Taliban video

MARTIN SMITH:

During the Soviet war Haqqani had received millions of dollars and tons of armaments from the CIA.

JALALUDDIN HAQQANI:

[Speaking Pashto] We should accept more martyrdom so that we can become stronger in this holy war.

MARTIN SMITH:

But Haqqani, the onetime U.S. ally, had begun regularly mounting attacks against U.S. and Afghan forces.

According to his son, the U.S. had tried to coax him from the battlefield.

ANAS HAQQANI, Senior Taliban official:

[Speaking Pashto] He accepted a life of hardship, despite the offers of a comfortable life from many countries, including the United States. But because of his beliefs and for the sake of his people, he didn’t accept those deals for a better life.

Taliban video

MARTIN SMITH:

Over time the Haqqani network became the most lethal branch of the Taliban. All the while, the Haqqanis maintained strong ties to foreign militants, including bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Haqqani also had a tight connection to Pakistani intelligence, who used the network to further their aims in Afghanistan. They were betting that the Americans would eventually leave Afghanistan, so they wanted to maintain a strong alliance with the Taliban.

OMAR ZAKHILWAL, Afghan Ambassador to Pakistan, 2016-18:

Pakistan did give them sanctuary. I mean, I know they would deny it, but it’s not deniable. Particularly their leaders. And Pakistan provided that space for them, and without that space, it would not have been easier for the Taliban to operate the way they did.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

So you have a situation where our partners, to whom we’re paying billions of dollars a year in various forms of security and economic assistance, basically are slow-rolling us. And the bottom line is that the Pakistanis were very duplicitous. We had a sense that they were confronting this, and the reality was that they were not going to do that.

MARTIN SMITH:

It was a fact that continued to anger President Karzai. But attempts to get the Pakistanis to crack down on the Taliban failed. Haqqani’s effectiveness was due in large part to his prolific use of suicide bombs.

ABU MUHAMMAD, Taliban suicide bomber:

[Speaking Dari] Only 10 minutes left until the operation.

TALIBAN FIGHTER:

[Speaking Dari] How do you feel, Abu Muhammad?

ABU MUHAMMAD:

[Speaking Dari] I feel a great calm.

MARTIN SMITH:

In this Taliban video, a suicide bomber is heading toward his target: a convoy of two American Humvees.

TALIBAN FIGHTER:

[Speaking Dari] Go on a little further. You’ll see the Americans.

MARTIN SMITH:

The bomber is guided by another militant who kept his distance.

TALIBAN FIGHTER:

[Speaking Dari] May God accept you as a martyr, Abu Muhammad.

TALIBAN FIGHTER 2:

[Speaking Pashto] I swear to God, I feel so happy right now. If you could feel this, you’d all want to become suicide bombers.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Haqqani network relied on young suicide bombers. Are you comfortable with, or how do you feel about this as a method of war?

ANAS HAQQANI:

[Speaking Pashto] When anyone’s country is invaded and a cruel oppressor shows up, the honorable and brave people of that country will do whatever they can to end that oppression. These suicide attacks were a last resort and were our strongest weapon against the invader.

TALIBAN FIGHTER 3:

Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!

HAJI MALI KHAN:

[Speaking Pashto] This was the idea of the mujahedeen, to sacrifice themselves.

MARTIN SMITH:

Haji Mali Khan is another senior member of the Haqqani clan, a brother-in-law to its founder, Jalaluddin Haqqani. Mali Khan was captured by U.S. troops and imprisoned at Bagram Air Base in 2011.

MALI KHAN:

[Speaking Pashto] You could choose how to defeat the enemy, by strapping a bomb to your body or by making a car bomb.

Haqqani video

MALI KHAN:

[Speaking Pashto] When one friend would carry out a suicide attack, then there would be many [volunteers]. Fifty or a hundred would appear. Because people would watch the videos that were encouraging the youth and it would attract many more people.

MALE SUICIDE BOMBER:

[Speaking Pashto] Give my regards to [our commander]. Tell him goodbye.

TALIBAN FIGHTER:

Allahu akbar!

SAMIULLAH MOHAMMADI:

I was a leader of suicide attack on foreigners.

MARTIN SMITH:

Any attacks on foreigners?

SAMIULLAH MOHAMMADI:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MARTIN SMITH:

Samiullah Mohammadi was one of Haqqani’s operatives.

So you made car bombs?

SAMIULLAH MOHAMMADI:

Yeah. Car bombs, suicide bomb [unintelligible].

MARTIN SMITH:

Bomb vests?

SAMIULLAH MOHAMMADI:

Yeah.

MARTIN SMITH:

Suicide vests?

SAMIULLAH MOHAMMADI:

Yeah.

MARTIN SMITH:

Mohammadi emphasized the Haqqanis’ ties to Pakistan.

But you say the Pakistan military was supporting the training—

SAMIULLAH MOHAMMADI:

Yeah.

MARTIN SMITH:

—that you received.

SAMIULLAH MOHAMMADI:

Yes. This was their national interest, to train us.

MARTIN SMITH:

Their national interest was what?

SAMIULLAH MOHAMMADI:

In that time they wanted to destroy the local government of Afghanistan.

MARTIN SMITH:

So the Pakistanis were training you—

SAMIULLAH MOHAMMADI:

To kill.

MARTIN SMITH:

—to go back to Afghanistan—

SAMIULLAH MOHAMMADI:

—and to kill Americans. In that time this—that was their national interest.

MARTIN SMITH:

One of Haqqani’s biggest suicide attacks came in downtown Kabul in 2008.

MALE REPORTER:

Forty people are dead after a car bomb tore through the front wall of India’s Embassy in Afghanistan’s capital city—

MARTIN SMITH:

Though Pakistan condemned it, intercepted communications established that the Pakistani spy service, the ISI, had helped the Haqqani network plan the attack.

MALE REPORTER:

—said the Haqqani network also attacked the Intercontinental Hotel, killing 12 Afghans.

FEMALE REPORTER:

At least 89 people were killed after a suicide bomber—

FEMALE REPORTER:

—security forces and three civilians died and scores—

FEMALE REPORTER:

Afghan civilians have been—

OMAR ZAKHILWAL:

The Americans also accuse him of the attack on the American Embassy. Killing of other Americans and all that.

MARTIN SMITH:

The attack on the Serena Hotel?

OMAR ZAKHILWAL:

Attack on the Serena Hotel and—

MARTIN SMITH:

And these attacks inevitably killed civilians.

OMAR ZAKHILWAL:

Yes.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

One thing [I don’t] agree, that the target was the civilians.

MARTIN SMITH:

Well, I have a list of all the attacks that were mounted by the Taliban and the Haqqani network, and I can share it with you.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

No, I don’t think you have that.

MARTIN SMITH:

Sept. 5, 2019, Taliban car bomb in Kabul kills 10 Afghan civilians. Another car bombing outside an Afghan military base in Puli Alam, Logar Province, kills four Afghans. In the span of a week, 24 Americans are killed, 107 Afghan civilians.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

But who is the target here?

MARTIN SMITH:

Well, if you go into a marketplace because there’s a couple of soldiers and you set off a car bomb, it’s going to kill women and children and innocent civilians.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

This was fighting.

MARTIN SMITH:

In Washington, as a new president took over, there was agreement that Bush’s war was failing. Obama ordered a review.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:

Today I’m announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

MARTIN SMITH:

Within the first few months of his inauguration he sent in 21,000 more troops. At meetings inside the White House, Gen. David Petraeus was foremost among those pushing for a new approach.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

The problem in Afghanistan had been that we’d never even had the right big ideas, the right overarching strategy. You just can’t drone strike and Delta Force your way out of the problem.

MARTIN SMITH:

Petraeus advocated a strategy known in military jargon as counterinsurgency, or COIN.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

June 2009

DAVID PETRAEUS:

The overriding mission of counterinsurgency has to be to secure the people. We must be partners there, good neighbors. To do that you have to, in Iraq, live among the people, and there you—

MARTIN SMITH:

Petraeus had championed counterinsurgency in Iraq. He explained it all at a major national security conference in Washington.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

What we are doing is what we call full-spectrum operations. The only way to do this is to apply all of these tools, not just conventional forces, which are—

STEVE COLL, Author, Directorate S:

When the United States achieved some stability in the Iraq War, it was through the application of counterinsurgency doctrine, led by Gen. Petraeus.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

Very significant reduction in security incidents in Baghdad alone.

STEVE COLL:

And there was a sense that this was the solution. Suddenly we had found the magic formula, and the magic formula was counterinsurgency.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

So you have to have a huge political component right here, and this is forcing every agency to sit in a room without barriers.

Counterinsurgency is, arguably, the most challenging form of campaign—

This turns into a whole of government approach.

—because it is not just the military operation of clearing bad guys from an area and then holding it. It also includes helping the host nation forces to reestablish basic services, to get the economy going again, to rebuild the damage.

MALE CNAS PANELIST 1:

The central goal of counterinsurgency is to make the population feel secure enough to engage in peaceful politics.

MALE CNAS PANELIST 2:

Protect the population above all other considerations.

MALE CNAS PANELIST 3:

A dramatic shift.

MALE CNAS PANELIST 4:

A long-term commitment to the region.

STEVE COLL:

In my experience of Washington D.C., I’ve never seen an intellectual bubble like that one. I mean, it was a conviction.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

Because, again, they are the big ideas. Afghanistan, on the other hand, has headed in the other direction.

DOUGLAS LUTE:

Gen. Petraeus argued that we had never really given counterinsurgency a chance in Afghanistan, and this was the time to do it.

MARTIN SMITH:

Over the coming months, Douglas Lute, who served both Presidents Bush and Obama, would become dubious.

DOUGLAS LUTE:

I was a skeptic of the model, not because conceptually counterinsurgency made no sense to me, but I didn’t think that the model applied well to the conditions in Afghanistan. What conditions? Poverty. Twenty-plus years of war already when we launched in in 2001. The ability to build a credible, sustainable Afghan army and police. The role of Pakistan next door. So there were a lot of factors here that caused me to believe—

MARTIN SMITH:

Lute also became increasingly concerned about partnering with a weak Afghan government.

DOUGLAS LUTE:

The Afghan government struggled for legitimacy across the Afghan people because of the endemic corruption of the Afghan government.

MARTIN SMITH:

But the Pentagon carried the day. Gen. Stanley McChrystal was chosen to execute this course correction. I interviewed him in 2009.

You had been in meetings with President Obama. What was different?

GEN. STANLEY McCHRYSTAL:

I think the decision to do a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy. First, preventing Al Qaeda return to safe havens that had been here before 9/11, but then also to review the way we fought. You are trying to win the support of the population, and that can be either through coercion, or it can be through offering things that wins their popular support. And at the end of the day, it’s really not terrifically complex in theory. The difficulty lies in the execution.

MARTIN SMITH:

Winning hearts and minds requires a large occupying force. But by sending in just 21,000 troops, Obama was embracing counterinsurgency-lite.

STEVE COLL:

In order to apply the standard ratio of counterinsurgency forces to Afghanistan, you would’ve needed to send something like 300 or 400,000 American soldiers to calm the country down. That was obviously implausible, and yet nobody wanted to abandon counterinsurgency as the solution. So, they looked at the map of Afghanistan and they identified places in the south and east where the Taliban seemed particularly strong, and they decided that they could apply counterinsurgency doctrine in those places, and then the math would work.

COL. CHRISTIAN CABANISS:

We’re attacking to seize control of the population from the Taliban. The people who are—

MARTIN SMITH:

In July of 2009, I followed a group of Marines sent to take Helmand Province in Afghanistan’s south.

CHRISTIAN CABANISS:

It’s time to change the game in Afghanistan.

MARTIN SMITH:

These men would be among the first to apply counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

CHRISTIAN CABANISS:

Make no mistake: We’re experts in the application of violence.

MARTIN SMITH:

Their commander was Lt. Col. Christian Cabaniss.

CHRISTIAN CABANISS:

The world will remember what you do here this summer. Forty or 50 years from now when you’re sitting around with your grandchildren, they’re going to ask you what you did in the summer of decision in Afghanistan. And remember—

MARTIN SMITH:

You gave a rousing speech to Echo Company.

CHRISTIAN CABANISS:

Echo Company is going to change history, starting early tomorrow morning.

MARTIN SMITH:

“Echo Company is going to change history.”

CHRISTIAN CABANISS:

They did. It just didn’t turn out like we wanted.

It’s our time to take our place in the illustrious line of Marines who have gone before us.

MARTIN SMITH:

You had to have some chills when you heard that speech from Cabaniss.

CAPT. TED HUBBARD, U.S. Marines, 2006-13:

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think that was the intent. It was a tough mission, and we didn’t know what was really going to happen.

CHRISTIAN CABANISS:

I want you to understand, I picked you specifically to be the company that goes the furthest south based off my confidence in your leaders and my confidence in you.

TED HUBBARD:

We just weren’t entirely sure how many Taliban were going to be there, and what kind of tactics they would use, what kind of weapons they were going to have.

MARTIN SMITH:

When did you come under fire?

TED HUBBARD:

We landed around 7:30. It was probably around 9:30, 10:00 that the fighting started.

MARINE:

Woo!

MARTIN SMITH:

Eight years after 9/11, the U.S. war was now fully on.

MARINE:

What are you doing?

MARINE:

Yeah, fuck you!

MARINE:

Hey, where’s it coming from?

MARINE:

Look out to the trees, to the right of the compound.

MARTIN SMITH:

The mission was to take a village called Mian Poshteh.

MARINE:

Jesus fuck!

MARTIN SMITH:

The fighting was often heavy, with almost no cover.

MARINE:

Stay down! Stay down! Stay down!

MARTIN SMITH:

The area was littered with IEDs.

MARINE:

What the fuck was that?

MARINE:

The fuck! It’s a fucking IED. I told you guys do not fucking cross right here. What the fuck!

MARINE:

Let’s go, he’s bleeding the fuck out. Get a doctor. I need a doctor and a litter team!

MARINE:

Litter team, now!

MARTIN SMITH:

On the first day, Echo Company suffered its first casualty.

MARINE:

Sharp.

MARINE:

Come on, Sharp.

MARINE:

Come on, Sharp.

MARTIN SMITH:

Twenty-year-old corporal Seth Sharp of Adairsville, Georgia, shot in the neck.

MARINE:

Let’s go. Come on, Sharp. Come on, baby.

MARINE:

Sharp! Sharp!

MARINE:

Hurry up!

MARINE:

Fuck.

MARINE:

Goddamn it, let’s go!

MARINE:

Where am I carrying him?

MARINE:

Come on, guys. Grab a leg, grab a leg. Grab one, grab one.

MARINE:

Let’s go. Let’s go.

MARINE:

Where’s the litter? Where’s the fucking litter?

MARTIN SMITH:

Cpl. Sharp didn’t make it.

After some hard days of fighting, Echo Company seized and set up their headquarters in an abandoned schoolhouse. Temperatures reached 120 degrees. On patrols, conditions were hellish.

TED HUBBARD:

You could walk through a dried field and it would feel just hot and you could sometimes then just hit a wall of humidity. I mean, it will sap, just suck the energy out of you.

MARTIN SMITH:

What’s the mission today?

TED HUBBARD:

The mission today is a couple things. Right now we’re trying to get eyes on a river crossing that we think the Taliban are using. The other part is trying to see how aggressive they’re going be. Trying to bait them a little bit into being overly aggressive and see if we can catch them in a trap.

MARTIN SMITH:

Do you expect them to attack you today?

TED HUBBARD:

I do.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Marines here were carrying out counterinsurgency’s basic tenets: clear, hold and build.

TED HUBBARD:

Clear, hold and build was a fundamental building block of the counterinsurgency strategy. You have to clear the insurgency out of the area. And holding it means you stay there to maintain the security, and then you try and rebuild, whether it’s trust with the population or infrastructure that was damaged or relationships between the people and the government. All that.

MARINE:

Sangay. Good morning. How are you?

STEVE COLL:

This was a contest for Afghan hearts and minds in areas where the Taliban enjoyed their greatest strength.

MARINE:

Salaam aleikum.

STEVE COLL:

The hypothesis was that bringing this counterinsurgency fight village by village, they would basically change the loyalties of the great majority of Afghan people and deprive the Taliban of social and political oxygen in these areas.

MARTIN SMITH:

It was ambitious. And when we were there, counterinsurgency, or COIN, didn’t appear to be working. People had fled their homes. Merchants had closed their shops in the nearby bazaar.

The Marines went out to reassure the locals that the Taliban had been cleared from the area and that it was safe to return home.

CHRISTOPHER MacDONALD:

Why are people afraid to come back to their house?

MALE VILLAGER 1:

[Speaking Pashto] Those people who live near the base are scared. They fear fighting between the Taliban and the government. They don’t want to get hurt.

CHRISTOPHER MacDONALD:

OK, well, now they can come back. They know that, right? People can start farming again. Hey, has anybody shopped at the market lately?

MALE VILLAGER 2:

[Speaking Pashto] We buy our flour from another bazaar.

MALE TRANSLATOR:

[Speaking Pashto] Where is the bazaar?

VILLAGER 2:

[Speaking Pashto] In Lakari. It’s far away.

MALE TRANSLATOR:

Sir, they’re going to Lakari.

CHRISTOPHER MacDONALD:

Why are you going to Lakari? The market right here is open.

MALE TRANSLATOR:

Taliban told, “If you go to bazaar, we will kill all of you.”

CHRISTOPHER MacDONALD:

Who told you the Taliban was going to shoot you if you go to the market?

VILLAGERS:

[Crosstalk]

MARTIN SMITH:

I spoke to Echo Company’s commander and asked him how well he thought his Marines understood counterinsurgency doctrine.

CHRISTOPHER MacDONALD:

You’re not telling me where. Where haven’t they gone?

CAPT. ERIC MEADOR, U.S. Marines:

They understand how important it is to win the population. They understand that. It’s sometimes difficult with Marines to reign them back.

CHRISTOPHER MacDONALD:

Now I’m going to ask this question for the fifth time. Hey, ask him to stop.

ERIC MEADOR:

What I try to tell the Marines all the time is the guy that you are nice to today is going to be the guy that doesn’t shoot at you or another Marine two rotations from now that comes back.

CHRISTOPHER MacDONALD:

Yeah, they didn’t answer my question. Listen to me for a second. I need you all to answer my questions. If not—

MARTIN SMITH:

What was being asked of the young Marines that I saw on the ground was that they needed to do an enormous amount of social work. And it wasn’t clear they had the patience or the understanding of the complexity of COIN’s rather intricate, head-spinning design.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

There’s no question that we asked an enormous amount of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, those on the ground in particular. My own son was out there as a rifle platoon leader. I have a pretty good understanding of what we asked of our men and women in uniform.

CHRISTOPHER MacDONALD:

You all are not cooperating, all right? You need to understand that we are here to keep the Taliban out.

MALE VILLAGER 3:

[Speaking Pashto] What can we do?

MALE VILLAGER 4:

[Speaking Pashto] We can’t provide anything. [Laughs]

MALE VILLAGER 5:

[Speaking Pashto] You have an army, planes, tanks and guns. We’re simple people with nothing. We don’t even have a rifle or a sword. If you can’t win, how can we?

KANDAHAR

May 2022

MARTIN SMITH:

After 12 years, I decided to go back to southern Afghanistan to see how things have worked out under Taliban rule. We first stopped off in Kandahar, the spiritual capital of the Taliban and longtime home to Taliban founder Mullah Omar. Tuberculosis felled Omar in 2013. Today’s supreme leader is Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada.

We attended Eid al-Fitr prayers at Kandahar’s grand mosque, marking the end of Ramadan, the monthlong Muslim fast. Mullah Akhundzada was ferried in by helicopter to preside over the service. Like Omar, Akhundzada is extremely secretive. He preached but remained out of sight.

SUPREME LEADER HAIBATULLAH AKHUNDZADA:

[Speaking Pashto] I wish for strength from God for our entire nation, and I congratulate you on your Islamic government.

“Omar’s Avenue”

MARTIN SMITH:

In Kandahar today, the Taliban rule much like they did in the ’90s. Barbers are not allowed to shave beards. Women are banned from most workplaces. And girls are not allowed to attend school beyond sixth grade or enroll in university.

So is this your office?

ABDUL RAHMAN TAYEBI:

[Speaking Pashto] This is the executive director’s office.

MARTIN SMITH:

In the center of town, we visited the local office of what used to be the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

Was this for the protection of women’s rights before the takeover by the Taliban?

ABDUL RAHMAN TAYEBI:

[Speaking Pashto] Yes, the women’s rights director was here [before].

MARTIN SMITH:

It’s now the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

ABDUL RAHMAN TAYEBI:

[Speaking Pashto] Hold your gun properly brother, so you can scare these people.

MARTIN SMITH:

I asked the minister about the rationale for the Taliban’s strict moral code.

We all remember in the 1990s, stonings of women for adultery. There were people whose hands were cut off because of stealing.

ABDUL RAHMAN TAYEBI:

[Speaking Pashto] The holy Quran has wisdom in this. If one thief’s hand is cut off, the entire society will be reformed, and nobody else will steal. If a man or woman is arrested and stoned or whipped [for adultery], it does not damage society. It is for reform, and it protects other people’s lives from moral corruption.

MARTIN SMITH:

We pushed on to Helmand Province, where we had embedded with the Marines back in 2009. The capital, Lashkar Gah, was one of the last cities, before Kabul, to fall to the Taliban in 2021. There was heavy fighting here, and much of the city was scarred.

I made an appointment to meet with the governor of Helmand; I needed permission to return to the areas we had visited years earlier. Governor Maulvi Abdul Ahad Talib fought for many years in Helmand to expel, as he put it, “the foreigners.”

I’d like to ask you what you believe are the reasons for your victory.

MAULVI ABDUL AHAD TALIB:

[Speaking Pashto] There are two reasons for victory. One is that Allah has promised in the holy Quran that any Muslim who stands firmly on religion will be victorious. [Also] the military education of our enemies was only on paper—

MARTIN SMITH:

Eventually I steered the conversation towards what I had come for—permission to head further south.

And we were in a town named Mian Poshteh. I can show you this video.

I showed the governor the scene of the villagers we had filmed when we were following the Marines.

CHRISTOPHER MacDONALD [in video recording]:

So you were told the Taliban’s going to shoot you if you go to the market?

MARTIN SMITH:

So our purpose in going down there is to meet the people that we met, understanding that history has to be told from two sides, not one.

CHRISTOPHER MacDONALD [in video recording]:

You all are not cooperating.

MAULVI ABDUL AHAD TALIB:

[Speaking Pashto] Tell them that we agree to their plan, but we will take instructions [from Kabul].

MARTIN SMITH:

I really thank you.

A day later, our crew was granted permission to make the four-hour drive to Mian Poshteh. When we arrived, local Taliban were waiting for us.

This guy over there is saying over the bridge. Yeah, I think it was right down here on this corner. This all looks familiar to me.

[Audio recording] All the shooting makes it harder for the Marines and the people to trust one another.

Yeah, that gate is behind us.

CHRISTOPHER MacDONALD [in video recording]:

I know there’s no problems, but you’re still going to see the Marines around here, like, every day, every other day.

MARTIN SMITH:

Yep, see this gate here? Same gate. Yep. Let me show you. It’s this gate. Same place.

TALIBAN FIGHTER:

[Speaking Pashto] Inform the elders to come.

CHRISTOPHER MacDONALD [in video recording]:

So you were told the Taliban’s going to shoot you if you go to the market? Who told you the Taliban was going to shoot you if you go to the market?

MARTIN SMITH:

You’re in here? Yeah? Oh, I recognize your face.

MALE VILLAGER:

[Speaking Pashto] Yeah, I was here on that day when they came and asked questions. They asked us, “Why are you not coming to the bazaar when we’ve provided security there?” But there was fighting, there was no security, we could not go there. There were roadside bombs and we were afraid for our lives. We couldn’t go back to that bazaar.

MARTIN SMITH:

So the Marines said they came here to make your lives better. They were going to get rid of the Taliban, they were going to keep them away. Did they do any of that?

MALE VILLAGER:

[Speaking Pashto] No, they did not help us with that, and the Taliban has not helped. They didn’t help us either.

MARTIN SMITH:

Is life better now?

OLDER MALE VILLAGER:

[Speaking Pashto] Yeah, this is definitely the case. We have become safer. There is still poverty, there is drought. But the fact is we are safe from fighting and bloodshed.

MARTIN SMITH:

Are you just saying all these things because we’re surrounded by Taliban with guns? Or is this what most people feel?

OLDER MALE VILLAGER:

[Speaking Pashto] I’m saying this for God. I’m not scared of the Taliban, nor am I scared of you. I’m not afraid of anyone. I am just telling you what I have seen and gone through.

MARTIN SMITH:

It was clear to me that for these Afghans, the war could not have ended soon enough.

[Speaking Pashto] Thank you.

The Americans stayed in Helmand for five years. Three hundred fifty died here.

MARINE [on radio]:

Roger. We still have about 200 meters until we’ve reached that first compound.

MARTIN SMITH:

But after clearing and holding places like Mian Poshteh, the Taliban kept coming back.

In late 2009, the Pentagon requested even more troops. Obama obliged.

BARACK OBAMA:

I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

MARTIN SMITH:

The U.S. troop level rose to a hundred thousand.

BARACK OBAMA:

Thank you. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

MARTIN SMITH:

But doubling down was a controversial decision. Even Vice President Biden counseled against it. In a memo sent to Obama at the time, Biden wrote: “I do not see how anyone who took part in our discussions could emerge without profound questions about the viability of counterinsurgency.” Biden was worried about sustainable surge numbers and the competency of the Afghan government and its security forces, all of which, he wrote, are “essential to the success of COIN.”

MARINE:

I know we brought school supplies last time. We’re still trying to get the concrete and the pipes, but they keep shooting at us on the roads and shooting everywhere. Nobody wants to—

STEVE COLL:

It was unrealistic what the Americans were trying to do with young men in fatigues.

MARINE:

Hello. Where are you going with your cows?

STEVE COLL:

And it was a crazy sort of way to plan a war, because it was fitting the topography of the war with the Taliban to a theory without stepping back and asking, “What is the big picture here? Why is the Taliban comeback working?” Those were the questions that might have been asked. They generally weren’t. There was this blind faith in counterinsurgency doctrine.

MARTIN SMITH:

Why do you think we lost?

TED HUBBARD:

I think we demonstrated a lot of willpower, being there for 20 years, and losing a lot of people and spending a lot of time and resources to try and make it a place that would be better and freer in the long run.

MARINE:

There’s still guys milling about in that tree line we were taking fire from. Hard copy.

TED HUBBARD:

But we weren’t successful in it, and I think it’s a matter of willpower.

MARTIN SMITH:

We didn’t have the will.

TED HUBBARD:

Correct. We had a good amount of it, but they had more.

CHRISTOPHER MacDONALD:

There are definitely guys in that tree line. There are definitely guys deep out there.

MARINE:

Yeah, the left hay bale, you come about one finger to the right and you go straight back, and he’s hanging out right there in between the trees.

MARTIN SMITH:

In his 2009 interview Gen. McChrystal had this to say.

The Washington Times said the other day that you’ve cleared Helmand three times.

STANLEY McCHRYSTAL:

Yeah.

MARTIN SMITH:

Never hold it.

STANLEY McCHRYSTAL:

Yeah. And once you clear something and don’t hold it, you probably didn’t really clear it. It has no staying power. In fact, I would argue that it’s worse, because you create an expectation and then you dash it. And so I think that you are almost better to have not gone there at all.

Part Two

MALE NEWSREADER:

Friday is the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Some people wonder why the war is taking so long.

MALE REPORTER:

We can tell you that 2010 was the deadliest year for U.S. troops yet.

MARTIN SMITH, Correspondent:

Ten years in, the U.S. was no closer to winning the war in Afghanistan than when it had first arrived. Over 2,700 coalition soldiers had been killed in action. Close to half a trillion dollars had been spent. And the Taliban were still gaining ground.

But President Obama had a plan.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:

Our nations agreed on a framework that would allow us to responsibly wind down the war.

MARTIN SMITH:

After trying a troop surge in 2009, Obama now planned to draw down America’s commitment and hand over all the fighting to the Afghan military and police by 2014.

BARACK OBAMA:

—where Afghan forces will take the lead for combat operations across the country in 2014.

MARTIN SMITH:

It was a move that would have major consequences. The mission shifted from thousands of U.S. boots on the ground to more high-tech attacks from the air. Large counterinsurgency operations were gradually exchanged for smaller task forces targeting Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgents. It was a strategy commonly referred to as “kill/capture.” But it would often backfire and ultimately strengthen support for the Taliban.

GEN. DOUGLAS LUTE, Dep. National Security Adviser, 2007-13:

These are largely small-unit operations. One or two helicopters land outside a compound based on an intelligence assessment, often telephone calls and so forth, that indicate that there was an enemy force in that compound. So, typically Taliban.

MARTIN SMITH:

Initially these raids were secretive. But on May 2, 2011, when special forces snuck into Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden, the scope of the raids became widely known.

BARACK OBAMA:

Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda.

GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS, Cmdr., Intl. Security Assistance Force, 2010-11:

The top leadership of the Taliban, of Al Qaeda, those senior leaders had to be detained or, if they resisted detention, killed.

MARTIN SMITH:

Gen. David Petraeus, a staunch proponent of winning hearts and minds through counterinsurgency, also embraced these raids or targeted killings.

Restraints put in place by his predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, were loosened and the number of raids would increase sixfold.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

By the time I took command in 2010 we were conducting somewhere between 10 and 15 operations on a given night against high-value targets of the insurgent networks and the extremist groups that were trying to reestablish a sanctuary in Afghanistan. Keep in mind, this is just not the guys going through doors. It’s not just the operators. It’s the drones that are on top of it. It’s all of the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance structure that we have to create to identify where the high-value targets are.

MALE VOICE 1 [on radio]:

Hit the guy on the road.

MALE VOICE 2 [on radio]:

Roger, hit the guy on the road.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

And then to overwatch the conduct of an operation with AC-130 gunships at night, and attack helicopters if you need them, and all the rest.

MARTIN SMITH:

In 2010, I embedded with a group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division and an elite team of Army Rangers who were conducting targeted raids. We choppered across Khost Province to a small combat outpost along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

CAPT. JOEY KELLER, U.S. Army:

So if we do have detainees, we’re going to flex them with the first lift and MPs are going to take over from there.

MARTIN SMITH:

Soldiers were preparing for some raids the next day, reviewing new intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected Taliban militants.

JOEY KELLER:

With that being said, new threats in Momundi. Scott and Chris.

U.S. SOLDIER:

These guys are part of Mohammad Ahmed’s cell operating out of Momundi. These guys are new, they’re new faces. We haven’t seen them before. On the sheet after the HLZ, I got the compounds labeled and they’re labeled next to their names here on the first sheet. So everybody needs to be tracking these guys and keeping an eye out.

JOEY KELLER:

All right, any questions? All right.

MARTIN SMITH:

We set out at dawn. The team was accompanied by a contingent of Afghan police in the ongoing effort to train Afghan forces.

JOEY KELLER:

The mission was a combined operation between ABP, Afghan Border Police, and coalition forces to ultimately clear suspected safe houses in three villages. We had about 17 persons of interest that we wanted to at least talk to.

U.S. SOLDIER:

All right, there’s a door to the left when you go in. Immediate left.

JOEY KELLER:

Targeted raids around this area have been very successful.

U.S. SOLDIER:

Left right here, there’s one window, and then there’s a section over there.

JOEY KELLER:

We’ve taken out cells and attacks have decreased significantly. But with that being said, a new cell is created, not necessarily in the same area, but ultimately the same effects on us. So, it’s the cat-and-mouse game.

MARTIN SMITH:

These operations came with risks.

AFGHAN POLICE:

[Speaking Pashto] Come out. Come out. Show us your hands.

CARTER MALKASIAN, Author, The American War in Afghanistan:

We were very focused on capturing members of the Taliban leadership and capturing Al Qaeda. So we would go into a house, go into an area and detain people or kill them. Now, sometimes the information that we got for that could be bad. It could be that someone who we were working with had some kind of grievance against a potential person, gave that information to the Americans so that we could conduct an attack.

U.S. SOLDIER 1:

Watch high. Watch high.

U.S. SOLDIER 2:

There’s something wrong.

MARTIN SMITH:

Within minutes of entering one compound, the team discovered a problem.

SOLDIER 3:

We’re obviously in here.

MARTIN SMITH:

They had the wrong location.

U.S. SOLDIER 4:

That’s his laborer’s.

U.S. SOLDIER 3:

So it should be that one.

MARTIN SMITH:

They had raided the home of a tribal elder.

AFGHAN VILLAGE ELDER:

[Speaking Pashto] Am I a bad guy or a terrorist or Al Qaeda? If you have proof, I’ll go with you. But if there’s no proof, then why are you insulting good and respectable people?

MARTIN SMITH:

Although the elder appears innocent, the soldiers decide to conduct a search anyway. They risk causing further offense, which put the accompanying Afghan forces in an awkward position.

AFGHAN SOLDIER:

[Speaking Pashto] Sorry, sir, our hands our tied.

AFGHAN VILLAGE ELDER:

[Speaking Pashto] They’re all over our country. What can we do?

MARTIN SMITH:

The raid turned up next to nothing.

AFGHAN VILLAGE ELDER:

[Speaking Pashto] I’ve already told you there’s nothing here.

U.S. SOLDIER:

I know! OK.

AFGHAN SOLDIER:

[Speaking Pashto] Don’t worry, sir. We’re on your side.

MARTIN SMITH:

Capt. Keller told me that the way they carried out the raids had to keep changing, in part because the Taliban kept adapting.

JOEY KELLER:

Insurgency changes daily.

U.S. SOLDIER 1:

Hey, this might be the same guy, but—

JOEY KELLER:

What the last unit was fighting six to 12 months ago, we’re fighting something new.

U.S. SOLDIER 2:

That is Masakan?

U.S. SOLDIER 1:

Yeah.

U.S. SOLDIER 2:

We’re going to search the rear.

JOEY KELLER:

If they know how we fight, they’re going to change their tactics. We learn how they fight, so we change ours. So, it’s very difficult to just focus on one objective or one mission.

U.S. SOLDIER 2:

Hey, we’re in Bravo 1, and we got targets seven and eight.

U.S. SOLDIER 3:

Believe me, I don’t want them sitting next to each other.

JOEY KELLER:

I mean, if one thing’s not working, we need to try another. And if that doesn’t work, then, you know—and the cycle just goes around.

MARTIN SMITH:

It can go on for a long time.

JOEY KELLER:

It could go on for another day or another 10 years.

November 2021

MARTIN SMITH:

Ten years later, after the fall of Kabul in 2021, I returned to Afghanistan. It was clear that for Afghans, night raids had been a major feature of the war.

This is the road to Wardak Province, once a hotbed of Taliban activity. The road is pockmarked from hundreds of IED explosions, used by the Taliban to attack U.S. convoys.

AFGHAN VILLAGER:

[Speaking Pashto] This is our house.

MALE TRANSLATOR:

This is his house.

MARTIN SMITH:

Wardak was a frequent target of kill/capture teams.

AFGHAN VILLAGER:

[Speaking Pashto] They attacked us from above. I’m not sure if it was a drone or something else. I fell down over there. One was killed here. One was here, and one in this place. And the rest were over there. I was injured in the stomach, chest and leg. I was also injured here in my throat and needed more than 130 stitches. I was in an emergency hospital for 13 days. After I was discharged, I came here and found that 14 people had been killed. Two of my brothers, three cousins, two of their grandsons. They were all my family in the village.

MARTIN SMITH:

Why did the drone attack this group?

AFGHAN VILLAGER:

[Speaking Pashto] I don’t know.

MARTIN SMITH:

Were there Taliban in your group?

AFGHAN VILLAGER:

[Speaking Pashto] Actually, no.

MARTIN SMITH:

We couldn’t verify this attack. But everyone here seemed to have a story.

MOHAMMAD AALEM:

[Speaking Pashto] It’s hard to say how many raids there might have been here, but I swear to God they were searching houses every day.

MARTIN SMITH:

Mohammad Aalem, a taxi driver, told me about a night raid on his house. One night in October 2009 he was home with his children and two brothers.

Was there anybody in the house that was Taliban?

MOHAMMAD AALEM:

[Speaking Pashto] In my guest house, there were guests. I don’t know if they were [Taliban]. We are people from rural Afghanistan. If anyone comes, we give them food.

MARTIN SMITH:

Aalem says he was not Taliban. Nor, he says, were his brothers.

MOHAMMAD AALEM:

[Speaking Pashto] [They] killed my brother. He was a police officer, a good one. He was on active duty, and on that night he had come home.

They blew up the gate, started firing. My brother was sleeping in his bed with his children. When he opened the [bedroom] door, they instantly killed him. They shot him here and over here and here. They shot him in all these places. [Cries]

LOCAL PRODUCER:

[Speaking Pashto] Do you need a minute?

MOHAMMAD AALEM:

[Speaking Pashto] I need to leave. I’ll be back very soon.

MARTIN SMITH:

Aalem says that after his brother was killed, their house was then set on fire and he was taken to Bagram prison with another brother. He spent four years there and, he says, he was never charged with any crime. But the experience turned him against the Americans.

MOHAMMAD AALEM:

[Speaking Pashto] After I was released from Bagram, I thought I would carry out a suicide attack because they were so cruel to me. The only reason I didn’t is because I have young children. I didn’t do it because I had to support my family. I had nothing left, so I had to work.

PRESIDENT HAMID KARZAI:

[Speaking Dari] The fight against terrorism in Afghanistan has allowed some actions that have violated our national security.

MARTIN SMITH:

Throughout his presidency, Hamid Karzai spoke out publicly against civilian deaths from raids and other errant attacks.

HAMID KARZAI:

We are going to ask the international community to end nighttime raids on Afghan homes and eliminate civilian casualties.

OMAR ZAKHILWAL, Minister of Finance, 2009-15:

President Karzai increasingly became bitter. The raiding of houses and night raids, he was strictly opposed to it. But the thing that particularly annoyed President Karzai was the killing of civilians. And it repeatedly happened.

MALE REPORTER:

In Ghazni Province, central Afghanistan, the dead include a woman and a child following what eyewitnesses say was a raid by U.S. forces.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Certainly the province of Kunar has had more than its fair share of civilian casualties.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Digging small graves for nine children, all under 14. Gen. David Petraeus has since apologized for the deaths.

MARTIN SMITH:

Karzai repeatedly complained to Gen. Petraeus that raids were backfiring. Protests were mounting, even as Petraeus made efforts to reduce civilian casualties.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

The accumulation of civilian casualties—mistakes, all mistakes, to be clear. I mean, we were very, very tough.

MARTIN SMITH:

Karzai complained repeatedly. He told you that you had to stop running night raids.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

Again, I understand absolutely the pressures that Karzai was under. And I sought to convey to him the challenges with which I was having to deal as the commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. War is full of mistakes, full of incredible loss, tragedy, heartbreak, hardship and casualties.

MARTIN SMITH:

When I asked Gen. Petraeus about this he says, “Look, war is messy. These things happen.”

DOUGLAS LUTE:

Yeah, it happens, but we virtually never held anyone accountable for civilian casualties. I mean, we paid condolences, and sometimes we said, “It wasn’t us. We’re sorry. It’s a mistake.” But we never held anybody accountable.

FEMALE REPORTER:

This footage shot by the Taliban appears to show ISAF airstrikes on another village in Kunar. A government inquiry found 65 civilian casualties. ISAF said it found no evidence that civilians were killed. Gen. Petraeus went even further, suggesting that some of the children’s burns may be down to parental discipline, not ISAF bombs.

OMAR ZAKHILWAL:

I remember that conversation with Gen. Petraeus about civilians who killed in Kunar. And some children had survived. They were in hospital.

MARTIN SMITH:

As a minister in President Karzai’s government, Omar Zakhilwal sat in on key meetings.

OMAR ZAKHILWAL:

And then what infuriated President Karzai in that conversation was when Gen. Petraeus say, “Look, these children are trained by their fathers to say this story. So, it’s–—they’re put at risk by their parents there, and they just want to defame us.”

MARTIN SMITH:

In February 20th of 2011, there was a closed door meeting at the palace, and there was talk about an attack in Kunar. And you made a comment that you believed that some of the families might have deliberately injured their own children in order to spark a reaction against the Americans.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

No. That’s mythology. I would never say something like that. I never did. It’s absolutely wrong.

MARTIN SMITH:

But the story circulated widely and made it to The Washington Post, CNN and other news outlets.

Gen. Petraeus denies being aware of the story.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

I’d never heard that story before.

MARTIN SMITH:

You’ve been asked in the past for comment.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

I’ve never heard of that story. Again, if I was asked, I clearly don’t remember it, and it’s not something that I ever would’ve said. This is just nonsensical.

SEN. CARL LEVIN, (D) MI:

Afghan officials have repeatedly called for an end to night raids, alleging that such operations are disruptive to Afghan lives and lead to civilian casualties.

MARTIN SMITH:

The number of targeted raids fell after Gen. Petraeus left. His successor was Gen. John Allen.

GEN. JOHN ALLEN:

This last year we had about 2,200 night operations. In all of those, there was less than 1.5% civilian casualties. Now, I don’t diminish any civilian casualties by reducing it to a percentage point, but after 9,200 night operations, 27 people were killed or wounded. That would argue for the power of night operations preserving life.

SEN. SAXBY CHAMBLISS, (R) GA:

Those are very impressive statistics and unfortunately—

MARTIN SMITH:

The Pentagon’s casualty statistics are impressive, and widely dismissed as underreported.

AZMAT KHAN:

So, there has not been a lot of transparency around this for many years now. So they run this civilian casualty—

MARTIN SMITH:

Azmat Khan won a Pulitzer Prize for her work investigating civilians killed in airstrikes. She says the Pentagon has been inconsistent in releasing reliable data.

AZMAT KHAN:

And so they put out these numbers in reports to Congress every year. And they’ll admit a certain number of incidents. But I can’t calculate it for Afghanistan the way I could for Iraq and Syria because they did not consistently put out numbers the way Iraq and Syria did, or maintain a total caseload of numbers.

MARTIN SMITH:

So, we don’t know.

AZMAT KHAN:

So, you can do it for 2018 and 2019, but it’s very hard to do before that because they did not release those numbers.

U.S. SOLDIER 1:

It pains us all here to know what you must be going through right now with the loss that you just suffered.

U.S. SOLDIER 2:

I’m deeply, deeply sorry.

COL. JASON DEMPSEY, U.S. Army, 1993-2015:

Oftentimes when we’d do an errant strike, we’d accidentally kill some civilians, we’d go and we’d make a peace offering. Hey, here’s a couple thousand dollars—

MARTIN SMITH:

Lt. Col. Jason Dempsey served two rotations in Afghanistan.

JASON DEMPSEY:

We would pay that family the equivalent of two goats and couple thousand dollars because you accidentally killed their uncle.

U.S. SOLDIER 1:

What we can do is try to help you out with a payment for your losses. It’s the absolute least that we can do because obviously there’s—you can’t bring back someone you love. So what I’ll do now—

JASON DEMPSEY:

You think it’s over, but it’s not because the irony, of course, was they didn’t forgive us. Yeah, they nodded politely when they’re in a room full of Americans and Afghan security forces. But they held those grudges, and they did accumulate over time, not only in an individual action, but in the narratives our enemies were building about us being indiscriminate killers. Our failure rate, if it’s 1, 2% out of hundreds and thousands of strikes per year, you can build a hell of a lot of stories about the evil Americans if you’re screwing up 2%, and I guarantee we were screwing up more than that.

U.S. SOLDIER 1:

Gentlemen, this is for you, for your losses. The U.S. Marines, the citizens of Afghanistan and the government of Afghanistan together can achieve great things to make Afghanistan a safer and more prosperous place for all.

MARTIN SMITH:

In February 2013, days after five children were killed in another raid in Kunar Province, Karzai finally ordered a ban on Afghan troops calling in U.S. and NATO air support.

HAMID KARZAI:

[Speaking Dari] Will we allow Americans to go into our homes tomorrow and kill people?

MARTIN SMITH:

In November of that year he tried to take it even further.

HAMID KARZAI:

[Speaking Dari] From now on, they cannot enter Afghan homes, be it day or night. It’s forbidden, and our people are free in their own country.

MARTIN SMITH:

For years there had been growing concern among some U.S. officials that the Pentagon simply could not win the war by force. Beginning as early as 2009, they had pursued a secret parallel track: peace through negotiations.

MULLAH ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

The American delegation came to my home.

MARTIN SMITH:

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef was one of the original founders of the Taliban, along with their supreme leader, Mullah Omar.

Zaeef, who was under house arrest in Kabul, recalls a visit from some Americans asking him to help.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

They said, “We don’t know how to find a solution.”

MARTIN SMITH:

But that was the message? That we think we can’t win this by force.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

Yeah.

MARTIN SMITH:

So we want to talk.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

Yeah. But my advice was to them, to talk to the Taliban. To give a political office. Recognize the Taliban as a legal party, not terrorists.

DOUGLAS LUTE:

A small group of us began to explore potential outreach to the Taliban. There were loose intelligence reports of so-and-so wants to talk, or here’s a guy who says he’s connected. Here’s a guy who says he knows the leadership, someone who speaks for Mullah Omar.

MARTIN SMITH:

Eventually, they were able to get in touch with a man who claimed to speak for Supreme Leader Mullah Omar.

MALE REPORTER:

The deceptively boyish Sayed Tayeb Agha. This is as close as you are likely to get to the Taliban leader.

DOUGLAS LUTE:

We found this fellow by the name of Tayeb Agha, a former Taliban government official.

TAYEB AGHA:

And we will defend our religion until—

DOUGLAS LUTE:

And he was also a close personal associate of Mullah Omar, who happened to be in an accessible place: Doha, Qatar. So, a place we could actually visit.

MARTIN SMITH:

Doha, 1,200 miles to the west of Kabul on the Persian Gulf.

How does Tayeb Agha become the chief negotiator?

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

He was the political [representative] responsible at that time.

MARTIN SMITH:

But he’s very young man.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

He was, young or not, but he was responsible for that.

MARTIN SMITH:

So how did he have that position?

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

I don’t know. This was [what] the leadership decided.

MARTIN SMITH:

So Mullah Omar and he were close.

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

Yeah. He was the close friend of Mullah Omar. He was working with him before that. He was a trustable person for him.

MARTIN SMITH:

The task of exploring talks with Agha fell to an old hand, diplomat Richard Holbrooke. Together with an adviser, Barnett Rubin, they devised a plan to vet Agha.

BARNETT RUBIN, Sr. Adviser, Special Rep. for Afghanistan, 2009-13:

We said to Tayeb Agha, “Can you bring us a message from Bowe Bergdahl?”

FEMALE REPORTER:

Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American prisoner of war held in Afghanistan.

MARTIN SMITH:

Holbrooke and Rubin also asked that Agha tell Mullah Omar to release a special message.

BARNETT RUBIN:

We told him that the message should include some comments on some recent events in Somalia.

FEMALE REPORTER:

American soldier Bowe Bergdahl was captured in the eastern Afghanistan—

MARTIN SMITH:

They reasoned that if Agha proved he had access to Bergdahl, the Taliban’s prized American prisoner, and to Mullah Omar, Agha would pass their test. But the Pentagon was against any negotiation. The military believed it was too soon for talks.

BARNETT RUBIN:

The military was always saying, “OK, we know there has to be a political settlement, but we should wait till we are in a stronger position.” And I used to say, “Why do you think you’ll be in a stronger position if you wait? If you want to negotiate when you have maximum leverage, you’re a couple years too late already.”

AMB. RICHARD HOLBROOKE:

[Audio recording] I am supporting direct talks with Taliban. They’ve indicated a readiness to talk.

MARTIN SMITH:

Holbrooke recorded his thoughts on tape.

AMB. RICHARD HOLBROOKE:

[Audio recording] Petraeus is strongly opposing all this. He says he wants to do it only when the time is right, which he says will be next year, by which time he’ll have had more military success. Frankly, I just don’t believe him.

MARTIN SMITH:

Over Holbrooke’s objections, the Pentagon put Holbrooke and Rubin on a tight leash as far as talking with Tayeb Agha.

BARNETT RUBIN:

The military was adamant: You can meet him and talk to him, but you cannot negotiate anything. You have no authorization to do anything. So—but they agreed that we could meet him. And the president signed off on that.

MARTIN SMITH:

But before any real talks were held, everything came to a halt. Holbrooke was hospitalized in Washington with a rare heart ailment.

AMB. MARC GROSSMAN:

If Holbrooke would’ve continued on, maybe this would’ve all worked out differently. But it didn’t. That’s not what happened. He passed away. I got this job. I did the best I could.

The responsibility to bringing peace to Afghanistan—

MARTIN SMITH:

Ambassador Marc Grossman, another veteran State Department official, took over the job of negotiating in February 2011. He met several times with Agha, at various locations in Doha, pressing the Taliban to talk with Karzai’s government. But it wasn’t happening.

MARC GROSSMAN:

It became clear, certainly in the second or third negotiation, that they weren’t interested in talking to the Karzai government.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Taliban had a different agenda.

MARC GROSSMAN:

I think they saw in front of them the opportunity to get their senior leadership out of Guantanamo.

MARTIN SMITH:

The talks were stalled. Grossman left in December 2012.

Wanting to revive the talks, Barnett Rubin stayed on as a consultant and tried to clear the way for a Taliban political office in Doha. At the time, the Taliban were headquartered in Pakistan, where they had been granted sanctuary. Pakistan protected them, but also watched them closely.

BARNETT RUBIN:

They wanted to have a political office. As Zaeef said to me, you will not know what the Taliban’s true positions are until they have a political office outside Pakistan. But as long as they’re in Pakistan, they cannot say anything.

MARTIN SMITH:

You wanted legitimacy and recognition?

ABDUL SALAM ZAEEF:

Yeah, yeah. And don’t mention the Taliban they are terrorists. Recognize them as a party, as a legal party, not terrorists.

MARTIN SMITH:

In return, the Taliban were to agree that they would not infringe on the Karzai government’s sovereignty. At the proposed office, they would not fly their flag and they would not identify themselves as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

It didn’t go according to plan.

BARNETT RUBIN:

I’m flying back to Doha, and at that time there was no internet on airplanes. I start scrolling through my Blackberry and I say, “My God, what happened?” The Taliban had a press conference on Al-Jazeera with a big sign saying “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” They raised the flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. This cannot stand. This is a violation of the agreement.

MARTIN SMITH:

So, I mean, you’ve got to be pretty upset.

BARNETT RUBIN:

I was pretty upset, yeah.

“Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”

MALE REPORTER:

The name Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan suggests it’s an embassy, representing an actual government.

FEMALE REPORTER:

The mistrust is rampant between the Taliban and the Afghan government and the U.S. You wonder where these negotiations are going to go.

MUHAMMAD SUHAIL SHAHEEN, Senior Taliban leader:

The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan simultaneously follows both military and political options.

MARTIN SMITH:

Another Taliban leader, Muhammad Suhail Shaheen, was at the new office the day it was to open.

One of the agreements that you had made is that you would not call yourselves the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and you would not raise your flag. But you did that. Why?

MUHAMMAD SUHAIL SHAHEEN:

No, that was not—it is not true.

MARTIN SMITH:

I have pictures.

MUHAMMAD SUHAIL SHAHEEN:

You have pictures, I was there. It is not needed the Americans call us as Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It is up to them. But we are—we have right to call ourself Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Everyone has the right, and everyone has a flag. Even if you go to a football team, they have their own flag.

MALE REPORTER:

Just 24 hours ago, there was talk of new prospects for finding peace in Afghanistan. Today, President Hamid Karzai angrily changed course, leaving the initiative in doubt and U.S. officials doing damage control.

JEN PSAKI, State Dept. spokesperson:

The secretary reiterated the fact that we do not recognize the name “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”

ABDUL ZAHIR TANIN, Afghan special representative to UN:

Raising the Taliban flag on Tuesday in Doha was just a reminder of a dark and bloody past from which our country still struggles to emerge.

MARTIN SMITH:

That night, Rubin rode over to the office and demanded that the flag and banner be taken down. The Taliban complied.

MALE REPORTER:

This is the Taliban’s new office here in Doha, in Qatar. Now, the Taliban had a big inauguration ceremony. There had been a plaque there, and it said the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

MARTIN SMITH:

So, after all this time—

BARNETT RUBIN:

Yeah.

MARTIN SMITH:

—the negotiations of three or four years just falls apart.

BARNETT RUBIN:

Well, yes. But you must understand. This is not something unusual. This is how peace negotiations go.

MARTIN SMITH:

Were you surprised when the Americans killed the talks?

MUHAMMAD SUHAIL SHAHEEN:

Yes, it was a very something disappointed to me. Something disappointed to everyone. To all—I think to all Afghans.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Taliban refused to resume talks if their name was not recognized and if their flag was banned. But there was an agreement for a controversial prisoner swap: several high-ranking Taliban officials in exchange for one high-profile American.

BARACK OBAMA:

After nearly five years in captivity, Bowe is coming home.

FEMALE REPORTER:

American soldier Bowe Bergdahl is a free man after being handed over in exchange for five Afghan detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.

MARTIN SMITH:

How was it that you were able to achieve the release of five of them? For one American. Five of them.

MUHAMMAD SUHAIL SHAHEEN:

Because the Americans who had invaded our country, but our prisoners, they were innocent. They were not part of the 9/11 and they were kept in Guantanamo.

MARTIN SMITH:

And now those men are in powerful positions in your government.

MUHAMMAD SUHAIL SHAHEEN:

Yes, they are ministers.

2014

BARACK OBAMA:

Hello Bagram. Hooah! Well, you know, I know it’s a little late, but I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by.

MARTIN SMITH:

Ahead of Memorial Day 2014, President Obama made a surprise visit to Afghanistan.

BARACK OBAMA:

After more than a decade of war, we’re at a pivotal moment. For the first time, Afghan forces took the lead to secure their own country.

MARTIN SMITH:

In spite of peace negotiations going nowhere, by 2014 nearly 70,000 troops had returned home from Afghanistan. And more were slated to leave soon.

BARACK OBAMA:

For many of you, this will be your last tour in Afghanistan. And by the end of this year the transition will be complete and Afghans will take full responsibility for their security and our combat mission will be over.

MARTIN SMITH:

Obama made good on his promise, and by the end of the year, the end of the war was officially in sight. In December, at a ceremony held under heavy guard to foil Taliban attacks, the U.S. and NATO formally relinquished control to the Afghan National Security Forces.

GEN. JOHN CAMPBELL:

Today, NATO completes its combat mission.

MARTIN SMITH:

The new mission was called Operation Resolute Support. Going forward, U.S. forces would be focused on training and advising.

There was another big change: Karzai’s two terms as president were up. Responsibility would now fall on the shoulders of a new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, a World Bank academic who famously co-wrote the book Fixing Failed States.

PRESIDENT ASHRAF GHANI:

[Speaking Pashto] Peace is our demand, and so there will be peace. We are tired of bloodshed.

OMAR ZAKHILWAL:

President Ghani was a teacher. He was a good talker. He would impress people with his ideas.

ASHRAF GHANI:

[Speaking Dari] I see in the face of every daughter of this nation the leaders of the future of Afghanistan.

OMAR ZAKHILWAL:

But he had this ego problem. He was condescending of others. He was a micromanager. The Americans knew it, but he was the best they had. They couldn’t find a better person than him.

ASHRAF GHANI:

I also want to say that we are very openly proud of our foundational partnership with the United States. You’re remarkable friends—

MARTIN SMITH:

But with the Americans leaving, Ghani’s hold on power was doomed. He was depending on the strength of the Afghan forces.

ASHRAF GHANI:

The Afghan National Army is an enduring tribute to your investment and sacrifice, so I want to thank you.

MARTIN SMITH:

But the Afghan army and police forces were plagued by corruption and low morale.

U.S. SOLDIER 1:

All right, let’s try it again. Change your order and—

U.S. SOLDIER 2:

Let’s go, baby, let’s go. Two more rounds! Two more rounds! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!

DOUGLAS LUTE:

The annual attrition rate in the military that we were building was 30%. We were losing 30% of the Afghan National Army a year. So we’re trying to build the force to 350,000, but there’s this giant hole in the bucket. Even though we were the largest jobs program in Afghanistan, we could not sustain an army.

MARTIN SMITH:

Many of you have just joined the police, is that correct?

Early in the program, I spoke to some Afghans being trained in Wardak Province.

And is it a good paying job?

They told me that they simply weren’t earning a living wage.

AFGHAN SOLDIER:

[Speaking Dari] We only earn 6,000 afghanis per month [$120], which is not enough. We each have 10 or 15 family members.

MARTIN SMITH:

Some never even received their salaries.

DOUGLAS LUTE:

In the whole country, we were the only reliable employers. They were actually supposed to get paid. What happened? They didn’t get paid. Their commanders ripped them off. And they eventually figured this wasn’t worth it. And they walked home.

MARTIN SMITH:

In effect, no one actually knew the true size of the Afghan National Security Forces. Basic attendance data was simply not reliably collected.

REP. STEPHEN LYNCH, (D) MA:

Can you tell me how many Afghan National Army personnel we’ve trained?

JOHN SOPKO, Special Insp. Gen. for Afghan. Reconstruction:

I can’t.

STEPHEN LYNCH:

Right.

JOHN SOPKO:

There is no way to give you that number.

STEPHEN LYNCH:

How about Afghan National Police?

JOHN SOPKO:

We don’t know. There’s no way—

MARTIN SMITH:

The inspector general for Afghan reconstruction, John Sopko, an Obama appointee, investigated this lack of accounting and brought attention to yet another problem—that of “ghost” soldiers.

What’s a ghost soldier, and what was going on here?

JOHN SOPKO:

That’s a term we’ve used and others have used. Actually, I heard it first from Ashraf Ghani, when he was finance minister. Went to his house for dinner and he said, “John, you realize you Americans are paying the salary of a soldier, and he doesn’t exist.” And that’s what it was. We would be paying the salary, and somebody else would be taking the money. Usually a corrupt bureaucrat.

MARTIN SMITH:

In his summary finding, Sopko reported that the U.S. paid more than $300 million a year to soldiers that may not have existed.

So where does the money go?

FAIZ ZALAND, Prof., Kabul University:

To the generals. To the commanders. To the defense ministers. To buy houses in California and Virginia and Germany and Turkey. All the defense ministers, all the chief of army of Afghanistan, none of them is in Afghanistan, and they are all having very cozy life, very nice life, very comfortable life in Europe and Middle East.

STEPHEN LYNCH:

You know, it’s a disgrace that we don’t have an accountable system, and here’s all this money being stolen. I commend you on your work. We just got to figure out a way to stop this.

MARTIN SMITH:

Throughout 2015, the issue of higher-ups siphoning payments from ghost soldiers popped up more frequently in Sopko’s reports.

That same year, U.S.-trained Afghan forces would face their biggest test in a provincial capital located in the far northeastern corner of Afghanistan, Kunduz. Getting there requires an arduous trip through the Salang Pass, high in the Hindu Kush mountains. We set out in May of 2022.

Once upon a time, it took a car or truck three days to get across here. But in 1964, a series of snow sheds and tunnels was completed by the Soviets, shortening the journey to just 10 hours. The last tunnel is the longest. By the time we reached it, traffic was backed up for miles.

Like so much else in Afghanistan, the tunnel’s in serious disrepair. The money that was meant to fix it has disappeared. Ventilation inside the tunnel was intermittent at best.

We’re in the Salang Tunnel. It’s almost 3 kilometers, this long section of it. And people have been known to die from asphyxiation, from carbon monoxide poisoning in here. Actually, today they’ve got a couple of fans working. About between 6 to 10,000 trucks come through here every day.

In December 2022, a tanker truck overturned inside the tunnel and caught fire. Thirty-one people died.

Eventually, we emerged safely and descended towards Kunduz. First stop, I had to visit the Ministry of Information to get permission to film here. When I arrived I was stopped by this group of war widows.

MARTIN SMITH:

Why have you come here today to the Ministry of Information?

AFGHAN WOMAN 1:

[Speaking Dari] My home was destroyed in the war. I came here to get on the list for assistance.

MARTIN SMITH:

As best I could tell, they had all either lost their husbands or eldest sons and were now unable to pay for shelter or food.

AFGHAN WOMAN 2:

[Speaking Pashto] I am widow and live with my young children. I wash clothes in people’s homes. I’m worried about food and everything.

MARTIN SMITH:

When you come here to the Ministry of Information, do they see you? Do they talk to you?

AFGHAN WOMAN 2:

[Speaking Pashto] They tell us to leave. They are just taking everything for themselves. There is nothing for us.

MARTIN SMITH:

I couldn’t help them either.

Kunduz has seen more fighting than most cities. By the spring of 2015, the Americans had largely pulled out of here.

Taliban video, 2015

MARTIN SMITH:

The countryside was in Taliban hands. As a result, the provincial capital was increasingly at risk.

TALIBAN LEADER:

[Speaking Dari] We are fighting for our great God to form an Islamic government.

MARTIN SMITH:

The defense of Kunduz would now be up to Afghan forces. What happened next foreshadowed the collapse of the Afghan army in August 2021.

MALE REPORTER:

The Taliban is progressing to capture the city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan.

MALE REPORTER:

On Monday, some 400 to 500 Taliban soldiers swept into Kunduz in a surprise attack.

AFGHAN SHOPKEEPER:

[Speaking Pashto] The Taliban came from four directions. They came from the gateways of Imam, Khanabad, Dawray and Kabul.

FEMALE REPORTER:

It was a carefully coordinated attack from four directions that highlights the insurgents’ ability to expand beyond its southern stronghold.

MALE SHOPKEEPER:

[Speaking Pashto] [The Taliban] captured the city. The government fled to the airport.

MALE REPORTER:

There was so little resistance, Taliban fighters had time to take selfies with local residents.

MARTIN SMITH:

The city fell on Sept. 28, 2015. It was the Taliban’s biggest victory in 14 years of war. Hundreds of prisoners from the city’s jail were released amid reports of revenge killings.

The Afghan army fled the city.

ASHRAF GHANI:

[Speaking Dari] Today, I have issued an order to dismiss all intelligence officials who have neglected their duties.

MARTIN SMITH:

According to a subsequent Afghan government investigation, more than a third of Afghan forces believed to have been deployed in Kunduz either deserted or didn’t exist at all—they were ghost soldiers.

ASRAF GHANI:

[Speaking Dari] Despite the presence of many government forces, we failed to defend Kunduz as we should have.

MARTIN SMITH:

Back in Washington, there was worry. If the Taliban could take one of Afghanistan’s largest cities, what would be next?

PETER COOK, Pentagon press secretary:

Well, obviously this is a setback for the Afghan security forces. But we’ve seen them respond in recent weeks and months.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Afghan army clearly needed help. But under Operation Resolute Support, the U.S. was not supposed to engage in combat. Scrambling, they made an exception.

MALE REPORTER:

We’ve seen U.S. aircraft supporting the Afghan security forces because they can’t do it alone just yet.

MARTIN SMITH:

What followed was a series of mistakes and miscalculations. One night, American forces had received instructions from their Afghan partners to strike a compound that they had identified as harboring Taliban fighters. An American AC-130 gunship was called in and opened fire.

They hit the wrong target. It turned out to be Kunduz’s only hospital, run by Doctors Without Borders.

ESMATULLAH ESMAT:

Two o’clock, when I heard bomb blast, all of the glass and the roof was collapsed.

MARTIN SMITH:

Dr. Esmatullah Esmat was resting after a 12-hour shift.

ESMATULLAH ESMAT:

And after that, it was not only one bomb. It was more than 100, 200 bombs.

MARTIN SMITH:

In fact, the gunship fired 211 shells.

ABC News Australia

KATHLEEN THOMAS:

We opened the door, and that was the most memorable moment for me, seeing this figure standing at the door.

MARTIN SMITH:

Dr. Kathleen Thomas, an intensive care surgeon, was on her first mission with Doctors Without Borders.

KATHLEEN THOMAS:

There was a nurse from the ER, I recognized him immediately. His left arm had been almost completely amputated and was just hanging by a small thread. And there was a big piece of metal sticking out of his back.

MARTIN SMITH:

Forty-two people died in the bombing, including 24 patients and 14 Doctors Without Borders staff.

FEMALE REPORTER:

In a new report, Doctors Without Borders describes patients burning in their beds and staff members shot from the air while they fled the burning building.

MALE REPORTER:

Doctors Without Borders wants an international investigation into war crimes.

MARTIN SMITH:

An Afghan government spokesman claimed the attack was justified.

SEDIQ SEDIQI:

Ten to 15 terrorists were hiding in the hospital last night and they came under attack. Well, they are killed. All of the terrorists were killed.

KATHLEEN THOMAS:

I mean, that was absolute bulls—. There was no fighters in the hospital. There was no one armed in the hospital. There were certainly no Taliban that were using it as some sort of base.

MARTIN SMITH:

Doctors Without Borders had repeatedly informed the coalition that it had a hospital operating in the center of Kunduz and they had provided the Americans with GPS coordinates.

MSF REPRESENTATIVE:

This hospital had been open for four years, was well-lit, easily visible from the sky and it was one of the most well-known facilities in the area.

MARTIN SMITH:

You had those coordinates. The military had those coordinates.

GEN. JOSEPH VOTEL, Cmdr., U.S. Central Command, 2016-19:

Well, you’re right. The fact that there was a MSF facility, or Doctors Without Borders facility, in Kunduz isn’t a surprise to anybody. That’s known.

MARTIN SMITH:

Who called in the strike?

JOSEPH VOTEL:

Ultimately, U.S. forces called in the strike. They—we were depending upon information we were getting from our partners on the ground with this, and again—

MARTIN SMITH:

But the—it begins with your partners on the ground?

JOSEPH VOTEL:

Yes, there are Afghan partners on the ground. So we’re relying on information that is coming from them, and it’s going up through our channels to our aircraft to actually deliver ordinance. But it was not a deliberate targeting of the Doctors Without Borders hospital. I’m convinced of that. It is—it was a mistake that was made in a fast-developing situation with humans in the loop, with imperfect information. And it was absolutely tragic, and we are completely responsible for what happened there.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Well, after four days of differing stories about how that hospital came under attack, President Obama decided to call Doctors Without Borders and say he was sorry.

JOSH EARNEST, Obama press secretary:

The United States, when we make a mistake, we own up to it. We apologize where necessary, as the president did in this case. And we implement the kinds of changes that make it less likely that those kinds of mistakes will occur in the future.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Pentagon investigated what happened but never publicly released their full report.

JOSEPH VOTEL:

I want to emphasize that the trauma center was a protected facility—

MARTIN SMITH:

They released only 700 heavily redacted pages.

JOSEPH VOTEL:

The investigation concluded that certain personnel failed to comply with the rules of engagement and the law of armed conflict. The investigation identified 16 U.S. service members whose conduct warranted consideration for appropriate administrative or disciplinary action.

MARTIN SMITH:

Was anybody disciplined for the, as you call it, mistake?

JOSEPH VOTEL:

Yeah, there were, and we did held people accountable as a result of that.

MARTIN SMITH:

Those names are unknown.

JOSEPH VOTEL:

Yeah, I’m certainly not going to talk about that.

MARTIN SMITH:

Were they removed from the service?

JOSEPH VOTEL:

I don’t know that anybody was removed. I didn’t—we did not remove anybody from the service.

MARTIN SMITH:

Was anybody court-martialed?

JOSEPH VOTEL:

We didn’t—we chose to go administrative measures on this.

MARTIN SMITH:

Only with U.S. help were the Taliban routed from Kunduz. But the Taliban had proved a point: Afghan forces were weak. The entire country was vulnerable.

The Taliban’s momentum was undeniable.

DOUGLAS LUTE:

The Taliban were gaining ground. We didn’t pay a whole lot of attention, but there were markers along the way that should have signaled to us that the Taliban were going to have a voice in the future of Afghanistan.

TALIBAN SUICIDE BOMBER:

[Speaking Pashto] We who sacrifice our lives for religion, we’re increasing every day.

DOUGLAS LUTE:

They were not going to be denied. They were not going to be defeated in anything like a military sense.

TALIBAN SUICIDE BOMBER:

[Speaking Pashto] I’ve been waiting for a year. But today’s my happy day, and my turn has arrived. I am heading toward my target.

DOUGLAS LUTE:

The Taliban were going to have a role. And at the end of the day, they got a role. It’s just not the role we imagined.

TALIBAN SOLDIER 1:

[Speaking Pashto] Hey, you soldiers loyal to this infidel government. Until your bosses leave Afghanistan and your infidel government collapses and is replaced by a pure, Islamic government, we won’t rest. Our jihad against you will continue and it will get even tougher, God willing.

TALIBAN SOLDIER 2:

[Speaking Pashto] Everybody say it: God is great.

TALIBAN SOLDIERs:

[Speaking Pashto] God is great! Long live Mullah Omar!

Part Three

VOICE OF LITTLE GIRL:

Pascal! Pascal!

FEMALE TEACHER:

[Speaking Pashto] Good job. Now who can read this chapter for everyone?

MARTIN SMITH, Correspondent:

For 20 years after America toppled the Taliban, girls in Afghanistan were able to attend school. They could dream of careers as doctors and lawyers. Seek office in government. Become engineers or journalists. Become leaders.

MARTIN SMITH:

For a while the American project brought real progress.

ZABIHULLAH MUJAHID:

[Speaking Pashto] We respect them. Women will have an active role in all aspects of society where needed.

MARTIN SMITH:

Initially, after taking power, the Taliban said they also supported girls’ education.

ZABIHULLAH MUJAHID:

[Speaking Dari]—in medicine, education, police, the legal system—

MARTIN SMITH:

But then in short order, they banned girls from attending school above the sixth grade. They said it was temporary. And in March 2022, as a new semester was about to begin, the Taliban announced that schools were going to open.

MARTIN SMITH:

After waiting nearly seven months, teachers and students headed off to school on a Wednesday morning. Upon arrival, they learned that the Taliban had reversed their decision. Everyone was ordered to go home.

MARTIN SMITH:

This is the minister here?

MALE VOICE:

Yeah.

MARTIN SMITH:

Salaam aleikum.

A month later, I met with Kandahar’s director of education.

MARTIN SMITH:

There was the expectation that girls would go back to school. And then, suddenly, there was a reversal.

I wanted to know why the Taliban had reneged on their promises.

DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION:

[Speaking Pashto] Afghanistan is one country and has one religion. Therefore, the formation of a framework and policy for education should be based on Islamic values, religion, culture and traditions. And this requires time.

MARTIN SMITH:

Why are all these decisions made by men?

DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION:

[Speaking Pashto] Islam has given priority to men over women. This is not a man’s wisdom. These are decisions from God.

MARTIN SMITH:

Restrictions have only gotten worse. Women are now banned from most workplaces, should be chaperoned when traveling far from home and are ordered to fully cover from head to toe.

MUNISA MUBARIZ, Women’s rights activist:

[Speaking Dari] Burqa is not my hijab!

FEMALE PROTESTERS:

[Speaking Dari] Burqa is not my hijab!

MUNISA MUBARIZ:

[Speaking Dari] Burqa is not my hijab!

FEMALE PROTESTERS:

[Speaking Dari] Burqa is not my hijab!

MARTIN SMITH:

Defiant women, risking arrest, have taken to the streets.

MUNISA MUBARIZ:

[Speaking Dari] [Afghanistan] is in the custody of the Taliban!

FEMALE PROTESTERS:

[Speaking Dari] [Afghanistan] is in the custody of the Taliban!

MUNISA MUBARIZ:

[Speaking Dari] Stop this injustice!

FEMALE PROTESTERS:

[Speaking Dari] Stop this injustice!

MARTIN SMITH:

Munisa Mubariz, who used to work as a policy director at the Ministry of Finance, is one of them.

MUNISA MUBARIZ:

[Speaking Dari] For nine months we’ve been standing against the lawlessness and cruelty of the Taliban.

MARTIN SMITH:

She says the risks are necessary.

MUNISA MUBARIZ:

[Speaking Dari] The struggle takes a toll and requires sacrifice. You’ll either get killed or you’ll succeed. You have to remember that.

At least we showed the world a picture of Taliban rule and the life of Afghan women under the Taliban.

TALIBAN:

[Speaking Pashto] Who gave you permission to protest? Stop recording or I will take your phone, motherf—–.

FEMALE PROTESTERS [chanting]:

[Speaking Dari] Education is our right! Education is our right!

ROYA RAHMANI, Afghan Ambassador to the U.S., 2018-21:

These women, these heroes, I would say, who are demonstrating on the street of Kabul, they literally put their lives on the line.

FEMALE PROTESTER:

Hey, hey, hey, hey! Calm down!

ROYA RAHMANI:

But not just themselves. Their families, their loved ones. This is the most heroic act.

MARTIN SMITH:

In December 2022, the Taliban would go even further: Women would be prohibited from attending university.

Zahra, a name we are using to protect her identity, hoped to one day become a doctor. She spoke out just months after the Taliban took over.

ZAHRA:

[Speaking Dari] I will not sit quietly. Don’t worry, we will educate ourselves at home. This is just a room. Knowledge is in our head and heart. If not school, I’ll work hard at home. If I’m not allowed there, I’ll study in my bedroom. If forbidden, I’ll close my eyes and do it there. Nobody can stop me. Nobody can tell me not to study.

PROTESTERS [chanting]:

[Speaking Dari] We are not afraid! We are not afraid! We are not afraid! We are not afraid!

MARTIN SMITH:

Opposing the Taliban, protesters wave the flag of the old U.S.-backed government.

PROTESTERS [chanting]:

[Speaking Dari] Our flag! Is who we are!

STEVE COLL, Author, Ghost Wars:

The achievements in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, they were not something that the world did for Afghanistan alone. It was something that Afghans themselves returned from exile to construct. This had been a very proud nation for most of the 20th century before it was wrecked by outside invasions.

PROTESTERS [chanting]:

[Speaking Dari] Our flag! Is who we are! Our flag! Is who we are!

ROYA RAHMANI:

This is the most painful aspect of this war. Nobody believed that the entire thing will fall apart overnight. That all of our gains would be lost away.

CROWD [chanting]:

USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

MARTIN SMITH:

By 2016, a growing number of Americans had lost patience with the war in Afghanistan.

FEMALE REPORTER:

The latest poll said 42% of Americans said the war was a mistake to begin with, so—

MARTIN SMITH:

It was too expensive and no longer in America’s best interest.

This was a sentiment that candidate Donald Trump drew upon. No more nation building, he said. America first.

DONALD TRUMP:

Afghanistan is a total and complete disaster. What are we doing? We can’t even run our own country. We don’t build our schools. We don’t build our highways. Money should be spent in our country—

MARTIN SMITH:

Trump was determined to cut a deal and bring home all remaining U.S. troops. He tapped a former ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, to reach out to the Taliban.

ZALMAY KHALILZAD, Chief U.S. negotiator, Doha talks:

My overall goal is not to seek a withdrawal agreement but a peace agreement.

MARTIN SMITH:

Now, you’re given a big assignment here.

ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

Because a peace agreement can allow withdrawal.

MARTIN SMITH:

All the talks have failed for the last eight years.

ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

Yes.

MARTIN SMITH:

Now, the mood of the president, Trump, is that we got to get out.

ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

Right. President Trump would like to withdraw the forces from Afghanistan. He thought that it was time to get out.

MARTIN SMITH:

To achieve this, Khalilzad began secret negotiations in Doha, Qatar, with Taliban representatives. The Afghan government wasn’t informed until the news leaked.

Is it fair to say that President Ghani was furious?

HAMDULLAH MOHIB, Afghan Nat. Security Adviser, 2018-21:

He was furious, absolutely.

MARTIN SMITH:

Hamdullah Mohib was President Ashraf Ghani’s closest aide and head of the National Security Council.

HAMDULLAH MOHIB:

We didn’t just feel like we were being cut out. We felt that our government was being delegitimized. The signal was, the Taliban are the key player now and that is who is coming.

ROYA RAHMANI:

The Afghan people have been speaking about peace for a long time.

MARTIN SMITH:

In Washington, a newly appointed Afghan ambassador to the U.S. met with President Trump, imploring him to maintain the U.S. commitment to the people of Afghanistan.

ROYA RAHMANI:

It was I believe Jan. 11, 2019, when I was presenting my credentials to President Trump. I was obviously nervous because I had very little time. The talks had already started in Doha. The government was excluded. Taliban were gaining more territory. So there was an opportunity.

MARTIN SMITH:

But you knew that he wanted to see an end to the war.

ROYA RAHMANI:

Yes.

MARTIN SMITH:

That he was anxious—

ROYA RAHMANI:

Yes.

MARTIN SMITH:

—and eager and impatient for an end—

ROYA RAHMANI:

Yes.

MARTIN SMITH:

—to the war.

ROYA RAHMANI:

Yes. So what were the options? To just say, “No, everything is going bad, let’s pull out”? Or try to work on it? I was a proponent of the negotiations. I encouraged President Trump to find a way to resolve this. To resolve this in a way that we do not lose all that we had worked so hard for.

MARTIN SMITH:

Rahmani had tried, but Trump was unmoved.

BARNETT RUBIN, Sr. Adviser, Special Rep. for Afghanistan, 2009-13:

Trump was quite indifferent to peace in Afghanistan, even more indifferent than the previous presidents. He didn’t care what happened in Afghanistan.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:

We’re like policemen. We’re not fighting a war. If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people. Does that make sense to you? I don’t want to kill—

BARNETT RUBIN:

What he wanted was to get the troops out of there, say he got the troops out of Afghanistan.

DONALD TRUMP:

It would be over in literally in 10 days.

BARNETT RUBIN:

And if he could get a photo-op making peace and get the Nobel prize, just like Obama did, so much the better.

MARTIN SMITH:

In a matter of months, with the Afghan government still on the sidelines, U.S. and Taliban representatives agreed on an outline for an eventual peace deal. Included were proposals for a ceasefire and troop withdrawals and eventual intra-Afghan talks to hammer out some kind of power-sharing arrangement.

But soon after agreeing, the Taliban introduced new conditions.

STEVE COLL:

Not only are the Taliban stubborn, but they start introducing new and outrageous demands. At a certain point they say, “Oh, and by the way, before we’ll consider talking to those illegitimate puppets that you’ve installed in Kabul, you’ve got to release 5,000 of our prisoners.”

ASHRAF GHANI, President of Afghanistan:

[Speaking Pashto] Taliban know that 11,000 of their people who were involved in criminal activities were caught red-handed while they were committing crimes.

MARTIN SMITH:

President Ghani rejected any massive prisoner release out of hand.

HAMDULLAH MOHIB:

President Ghani’s reaction was that the prisoners is not something the Americans can give. These are prisoners in Afghan prisons, not in American prisons. And the Afghan government should be using this as its own leverage in negotiations with the Taliban, and so the Americans did not have the right to negotiate this on our behalf.

MARTIN SMITH:

Despite Ghani’s objections, the U.S. pushed ahead.

MALE NEWSREADER:

We are back now with an historic agreement between the United States and the Taliban that could bring peace to the region and end America’s longest-fought war.

MARTIN SMITH:

On Feb. 29, 2020, at a grand ceremony in Doha, the U.S. and Taliban signed a deal.

MALE NEWSREADER:

This was one of the strangest scenes you could imagine. American diplomats in business suits and badges sitting down with the Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist group which hosted Osama bin Laden before 9/11. But that is what diplomacy looks like.

MARTIN SMITH:

The U.S. agreed to a full withdrawal by May of 2021, and the Taliban pledged to no longer harbor any foreign terrorist groups, but they would not agree to denounce Al Qaeda.

The Taliban refused to repudiate Al Qaeda, to condemn Osama bin Laden.

MUHAMMAD SUHAIL SHAHEEN, Senior Taliban leader:

As it is mentioned in the Doha Agreement, we will not allow any party, any individual to use the soil of Afghanistan against other country. That is our criteria. So anyone, any party, kills civilians, we are condemning.

MARTIN SMITH:

The U.S. also agreed that Ghani would release 5,000 prisoners within two weeks.

ROYA RAHMANI:

The terms of the agreement was way more favorable to Taliban. There is no question.

MARTIN SMITH:

So who’s accountable for that agreement handing so much power to the Taliban?

ROYA RAHMANI:

I raised that with Ambassador Khalilzad directly myself. But he kept insisting all along that the negotiations had four elements, and nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. And this was the mantra that was being sang all along. But then, at the end, that did not materialize.

MARTIN SMITH:

The agreement was supposed to lead to a ceasefire that was described as “comprehensive.” But while the U.S. and Taliban agreed not to attack each other, the Taliban did not agree to a ceasefire with Afghan forces.

They’re getting a pretty good deal here. They’re not having to put down their weapons.

ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

Right.

MARTIN SMITH:

The United States is agreeing not to go to war against them.

ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

Right.

MARTIN SMITH:

We’re agreeing to release their prisoners.

ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

Right.

MARTIN SMITH:

Ghani remained adamantly opposed to the terms of the deal.

ASHRAF GHANI:

[Speaking Dari] No commitment has been made for the release of 5,000 prisoners. We have repeatedly shared this issue with Khalilzad—

MARTIN SMITH:

Negotiations for a prisoner release continued. And so did the war, largely on Taliban terms.

MALE NEWSREADER:

New violence in Afghanistan just days after that landmark truce.

HAMDULLAH MOHIB:

During this time when we were negotiating prisoner release, the Taliban were targeting Afghan government officials and killing them. And at the same time, not claiming responsibility.

MARTIN SMITH:

At this time, the Taliban were carrying out an average of 55 attacks a day, a spike that had doubled the casualties among Afghan security forces.

HAMDULLAH MOHIB:

They are asking us to release prisoners who had been imprisoned because they had killed Afghan civilians or government officials.

MARTIN SMITH:

In other words, to release them, you would be strengthening the hand of your enemy.

HAMDULLAH MOHIB:

The hand of our enemy.

MARTIN SMITH:

So you objected.

HAMDULLAH MOHIB:

Correct.

MALE REPORTER:

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has finally relented.

MARTIN SMITH:

But under major diplomatic pressure from the U.S., Ghani acquiesced.

MALE REPORTER:

The president has issued a decree for the conditional release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners. Just last week—

MARTIN SMITH:

With the release of the prisoners, the Taliban were finally willing to talk to Ghani’s representatives.

MALE REPORTER:

The Afghan government and Taliban met today in Doha, Qatar, for the historic negotiations aimed to form a power-sharing government. Mike Pompeo was on hand.

MARTIN SMITH:

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in Doha to kick off the intra-Afghan talks.

MIKE POMPEO:

Seize this opportunity. Protect this process. Respect each other. Be patient. Remain focused on the mission. We’re prepared to support your negotiations should you ask, but this time is yours. This time is yours. I pray that you will seize the moment.

ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

The Afghan government was there as well as the Taliban. It was a big ceremony. Many ministers were present there. So it was a significant achievement that for the first time in 40 years, Afghans on the two sides fighting each other met and started negotiations.

MARTIN SMITH:

The talks were supposed to get Afghans on both sides to come together and in good faith jointly decide on the future of Afghanistan. But the talks went nowhere.

NADER NADERY, Afghan govt. negotiator, Doha talks:

After a month and a half negotiating I reached to this conclusion that the Taliban are not believing in a shared future. They would not accept a political settlement. They’re only looking for a military takeover.

MARTIN SMITH:

Nader Nadery was one of President Ghani’s top negotiators in those talks. He says issues like freedom of the press, inclusivity in the government and women’s rights were foremost on his team’s agenda.

NADER NADERY:

The Taliban played so smartly. They presented the soft view of the Taliban. They had said that we respect women rights according to Islam. And then everybody was excited. “Oh, Taliban have changed. Taliban have changed.” When we were negotiating, we were pressing on them. Would a woman be part of the government? Never a clear answer. Mostly, no.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Taliban had no real reason to make concessions. The Americans were leaving in a matter of months and their prisoners were freed. They already had everything they wanted.

The criticism that’s directed at you is that you leaned towards the Taliban, that you—

ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

No.

MARTIN SMITH:

—that you were soft on the Taliban.

ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

Not at all.

MARTIN SMITH:

But that’s the criticism.

ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

Well, I mean, people can say a lot of interests have been affected by what we have done.

MARTIN SMITH:

You reject the idea that you handed a good deal to the Taliban?

ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

Not at all, not at all. I got a good deal for the United States. We wanted out. We wanted out safely, we got out safely.

MARTIN SMITH:

What about the Afghan people that are now living back under the Taliban?

ZALMAY KHALILZAD:

Well, I mean, it’s clearly a very mixed picture. On the positive side, 20 years of war has ended. But I regret that the Afghans didn’t reach an agreement. I regret that very much.

GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS, Cmdr., Intl. Security Assistance Force, 2010-11:

You know, what we did was we got the Taliban to agree to let us do what we wanted to do, which was leave. We didn’t allow our allies at the table to discuss the future of their country. We signed it without their assent. We forced them to do something they didn’t want to do, which was to release 5,000 detainees from their detention facilities who went right back to fighting. It’s an instrument of surrender, not a peace agreement. And certainly, it didn’t achieve peace in Afghanistan.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN:

When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement—

MARTIN SMITH:

When President Joe Biden arrived at the White House the question loomed: Would he scrap the treaty signed by the Taliban and the Trump administration?

JOE BIDEN:

After consulting closely with our allies and partners, with our military leaders—

MARTIN SMITH:

Three months into his presidency, Biden announced he would stick to the deal.

April 14, 2021

JOE BIDEN:

—I have concluded that it’s time to end America’s longest war. It’s time for American troops to come home. We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We’ll do it responsibly—

MARTIN SMITH:

To accommodate an orderly withdrawal, Biden moved the date of the pullout from May 1 to Sept. 11.

JOE BIDEN:

—20th anniversary of that heinous attack on the United States—

STEVE COLL, Author, Directorate S:

There was no legal or even really political reason why Joe Biden had to hold to Trump’s deal. The question for him was if he didn’t hold to it, what would the Taliban do, and then what price in blood and expenditure would the United States have to pay in order to go back to war, as it were, with the Taliban?

MARTIN SMITH:

With Biden’s withdrawal, the fuse was lit on what would within four months lead to a complete Taliban takeover by Aug. 15. Any hope of a coalition government was doomed to fail.

Source: FDD’s Long War Journal

MARTIN SMITH:

It began with rural areas and taking control of highways. The Taliban quickly seized territory throughout April and May, and by late June they had captured more than 150 of Afghanistan’s 407 districts.

MALE REPORTER:

As U.S. troops leave, some Afghan security units are collapsing. The Taliban’s propaganda channels show Afghan police and soldiers giving up their bases and their weapons.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Taliban seized thousands of weapons and loads of ammunition, and they began closing in on provincial capitals.

DEBORAH LYONS, Head, UN Assist. Mission, Afghanistan, 2020-22:

The Taliban are positioning themselves to try and take these capitals once foreign forces are fully withdrawn. I cannot overstate my concern regarding the present situation.

MARTIN SMITH:

Deborah Lyons was head of the U.N.’s Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

DEBORAH LYONS:

Districts were falling. Taliban saying they were not going to take provincial capitals, having made that commitment to the Americans, but it was clear that they were, in fact, moving to take the provincial capitals.

MARTIN SMITH:

Meanwhile, in Doha, intra-Afghan talks were continuing. The Taliban had signaled they would not attack Kabul or even provincial capitals. But on the ground, they were not complying. On this and other issues, the talks proved futile.

NADER NADERY:

I had a hope that we will at least preserve certain parts of the past and the constitution so we can build upon it for the future. But I knew that provinces would be lost and we are very disadvantaged. We didn’t have the leverage to negotiate—

MARTIN SMITH:

Taliban were occupying all sorts of cities.

NADER NADERY:

All sorts of cities, and they were close to Kabul.

MARTIN SMITH:

Alarmed by the Taliban’s rapid advances, President Ghani and National Security Adviser Mohib flew to Washington to ask Biden for reassurance of continued U.S. support.

June 25, 2021

ASHRAF GHANI:

The Afghan nation is an 1861 moment, like President Lincoln, rallying to the defense of the republic.

HAMDULLAH MOHIB:

When the meeting took place, President Biden asked what we needed, and the first thing President Ghani asked was, “We need a friend in the White House.” And President Biden said, “You have a friend in the White House.”

JOE BIDEN:

But we’re going to stick with you and we’re going to do our best to see to it you have the tools you need.

MARTIN SMITH:

For months, the Pentagon had been reassuring the Afghan army that withdrawal did not mean the end of U.S. engagement and support.

Lt. Gen. Sami Sadat commanded Afghanistan’s special forces.

GEN. SAMI SADAT, Cmdr., Afghan Special Forces:

The American forces promised that even without the U.S. combat presence, we will continue to fund, equip and logistically support the Afghan army. This is what we were told.

MARTIN SMITH:

But on July 2, 2021, in the dead of night, the U.S. pulled out of Bagram, its largest air base in Afghanistan.

MALE REPORTER:

The U.S. military, citing security concerns, is not saying when or how U.S. troops are leaving. Bases are shutting down with hardly a peep.

MARTIN SMITH:

Were you informed?

HAMDULLAH MOHIB:

We weren’t in the discussion. We knew they were going to evacuate Bagram, but from my understanding, Bagram would be the last place they evacuate, not one of the first places.

MARTIN SMITH:

So you never received a phone call saying, “We’re going to leave Bagram today”?

HAMDULLAH MOHIB:

No. No.

FEMALE REPORTER:

At its peak, 100,000 U.S. troops were stationed there. Bagram was the epicenter of the U.S. and NATO’s war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

MARTIN SMITH:

Over four presidencies, America and its allies had occupied over 700 bases. All of them, one by one, were packed up and closed down.

MALE REPORTER:

A formidable fortress for two decades, where hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent, now looks like a junkyard. U.S. forces say they have destroyed nearly 15,000 pieces of equipment to avoid hardware falling to the Taliban.

SAMI SADAT:

The Americans pulled out all the support elements, all the contractors. We were low on ammunition. We didn’t have the laser-guided bombs and missiles. And what does it mean? Of course, it meant that the Taliban are coming to take over.

MARTIN SMITH:

No one in the Biden administration agreed to an interview about the final days before Afghanistan’s collapse.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Are you worried that the Afghan government might fall? I mean, we are hearing about how the Taliban is taking more and more districts.

JOE BIDEN:

Look, we were in that war for 20 years. Twenty years. And—

MARTIN SMITH:

The same weekend that Bagram Air Base shut down, President Biden was asked about the stability of the Afghan government in the face of a Taliban surge.

JOE BIDEN:

I think they have the capacity to be able to sustain the government.

MARTIN SMITH:

After repeated questions on Afghanistan—

MALE REPORTER:

Back to Afghanistan—

JOE BIDEN:

I want to talk about happy things, man.

MARTIN SMITH:

—Biden was pressed about whether the U.S. should step in and support Afghan forces. He seemed to suggest that the advancing Taliban was now the Afghan government’s problem.

JOE BIDEN:

But the Afghans are going to have to be able to do it themselves with the air force they have and which we’re helping them maintain.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Sir, on Afghanistan—

JOE BIDEN:

Now, I’m going to answer any more questions on Afghanistan. Look, it’s Fourth of July.

MARTIN SMITH:

In July, in the western city of Herat, the government was arming local militias to help Afghan forces fight off the Taliban, who were now closing in on the city center.

ISMAIL KHAN:

[Speaking Dari] OK, I will send it. Guys with the PK guns—

MARTIN SMITH:

Ismail Khan, a former governor of Herat, is one of Afghanistan’s most famous warlords. He’s known as the Lion of Herat. Khan had helped the Americans defeat the Taliban back in 2001.

ISMAIL KHAN:

[Speaking Dari] All these guys with the scarf are my guys.

MARTIN SMITH:

Now, 20 years later, he recruited thousands of his supporters to defend his country again.

AFGHAN REPORTER:

[Speaking Dari] Is the government helping you? What’s the situation in Herat?

ISMAIL KHAN:

[Speaking Dari] Reinforcements were supposed to arrive yesterday. Turn off your phone. The president spoke with me. Reinforcements should have arrived last night.

AFGHAN REPORTER:

[Speaking Dari] Is there a risk that Herat could fall to the Taliban?

ISMAIL KHAN:

[Speaking Dari] God willing, they won’t capture it.

MALE TRANSLATOR:

No, never will they control the city.

MARTIN SMITH:

Throughout the country, reinforcements and supplies were not showing up.

MALE SPEAKER:

[Speaking Pashto] [The Taliban] has completely captured the Baraki Barak district in Logar Province.

MARTIN SMITH:

And as the Afghan army and police realized they were on their own, they began abandoning their checkpoints and bases en masse.

TALIBAN 1:

[Speaking Pashto] There’s no problem. Be happy. Welcome, guys.

TALIBAN 2:

[Speaking Dari] How are you? Where are you coming from?

AFGHAN SOLDIER:

[Speaking Dari] From the airport.

TALIBAN 2:

[Speaking Dari] And you surrendered?

AFGHAN SOLDIER:

[Speaking Dari] Yes.

TALIBAN 2:

[Speaking Dari] How many surrendered?

AFGHAN SOLDIER:

[Speaking Dari] There were 500 tanks that surrendered.

TALIBAN 2:

[Speaking Dari] Five hundred?

JOHN SOPKO, Special Insp. Gen., Afghanistan Reconstruction:

The Taliban, they would basically come to the Afghan soldier or policeman who’s out in some God-forsaken outpost and say, “Hey, look it, we already cut a deal with the Americans. Why do you want to fight?”

MALE REPORTER:

The Taliban have even been handing out pocket money to pay for their transport home.

JOHN SOPKO:

“Here, take 5,000 afghanis”—which is enough for a bus ticket—”go home and just give up.” The average Afghan soldier knew it was over, so why die for Ghani and the Ghani administration?

Source: FDD’s Long War Journal

MARTIN SMITH:

By the end of July, the Taliban had taken 223 districts, over half the country.

SEN. MITCH McCONNELL, (R) KY:

Afghanistan is unraveling. But President Biden remains defiant. He’s rejected warnings.

MARTIN SMITH:

In Washington that month, alarms were going off.

MITCH McCONNELL:

A reckless rush for the exits is becoming a global embarrassment.

August 6, 2021

FEMALE REPORTER:

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has made big gains this week. They’re surrounding a number of cities—

MARTIN SMITH:

But into August, the White House was still hoping that a power-sharing agreement would be hammered out in Doha, and the administration was still insisting that Afghan forces should step up.

JEN PSAKI, White House Press Secretary:

—that the Afghan government and the Afghan National Defense Forces have the training, equipment and numbers to prevail. And now is the moment for the leadership and the will in the face of the Taliban’s aggression and violence.

MARTIN SMITH:

On Aug. 8, the first major capital fell: Kunduz—the same provincial capital the Taliban had seized in 2015.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Hundreds of Afghan soldiers under siege at the Kunduz airport reportedly surrendered. Taliban video purports to show vehicles, weapons, even an attack helicopter now in their hands.

August 9, 2021

JOHN KIRBY, Pentagon Press Secretary:

Clearly, the security situation is deteriorating. And just over the last, what, 72 hours, roughly five provincial capitals fell to the Taliban. That’s deeply concerning.

AFGHAN SPEAKER:

[Speaking Pashto] Move away! Move away! So that they don’t fire at you.

MARTIN SMITH:

By Aug. 12, 17 out of 34 provincial capitals had fallen, including Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Taliban claims hundreds of prisoners in Kandahar are free after they overwhelmed the jail holding the insurgents and flung open the gates.

MARTIN SMITH:

As Kandahar fell in the south, Afghanistan’s third-largest city fell in the west: Herat.

MALE REPORTER:

In a massive blow, the Taliban have captured warlord Ismail Khan.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Lion of Herat had surrendered.

MARTIN SMITH:

By mid-August, the Taliban were controlling or contesting over 85% of the country.

Kabul was now in their sights. The Pentagon was attempting damage control.

August 13, 2021

JOHN KIRBY:

Kabul is not, right now, in an imminent threat environment. But you can see that they are trying to isolate Kabul. So, it still is a moment for the Afghans to unite, the leadership and in the military. No outcome has to be inevitable here.

HAMDULLAH MOHIB:

Capitals were falling, but there was still this perception that Taliban do not want to take Kabul by force. Ambassador Khalilzad and other Americans had told us this directly, saying that Taliban had assured them that they don’t want to take Kabul by force.

ASHRAF GHANI:

[Speaking Pashto] I thank my nation for standing strong with the Afghan Defense Forces.

MARTIN SMITH:

President Ghani, who had been relatively quiet over the last two turbulent weeks, was also reassuring the residents of Kabul.

August 14, 2021

ASHRAF GHANI:

[Speaking Pashto] Our priority is a remobilized security response, and we’re taking strong measures to make that happen.

I know you’re worried about the current and future situation. I want to assure you that as your president, I’m focused on avoiding the further spread of instability, violence.

MARTIN SMITH:

But across the capital, worry was turning to panic.

DEBORAH LYONS:

It’s fascinating to be in a moment of collective panic, when everyone around you is panicking, not outwardly, but you can feel people’s uncertainty and rising fear, and not knowing what’s to come, because no one really knew how this would unfold, how the Taliban would react once they took over Kabul and so forth. What was in everyone’s mind and heart was, what does this mean to Afghanistan? What does it mean to the people?

MARTIN SMITH:

At the presidential palace, Ghani contemplated his fate. The last president to face a Taliban takeover in 1996 was castrated, dragged through the streets and his body hung outside the palace.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Interior Ministry says the Taliban has started entering the capital, Kabul, from all sides.

MALE REPORTER:

We’ve just been out onto the streets, and I can tell you it’s the Taliban driving around town heavily armed in pickup trucks and Humvees.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Taliban entered Kabul on the morning of Aug. 15, 2021.

FEMALE REPORTER:

The Afghan president is currently holding emergency talks with U.S. diplomats—

HAMDULLAH MOHIB:

We knew from intelligence that the two factions of the Taliban are competing to take the presidential palace and execute the president. And our ally, our belief, was not going to protect and defend him.

MARTIN SMITH:

Those who worked for Ghani’s government also felt particularly vulnerable.

Munisa Mubariz was on her way to the Ministry of Finance.

MUNISA MUBARIZ, Fmr. Policy Dir., Finance Ministry:

[Speaking Dari] There was a huge crowd of people on the road, fleeing. Everyone was in a state of flight. Shopkeeper, cobbler, mason, carpenter, everyone was leaving. People in cars were pointing toward my driver saying, “Your license plate is governmental. They will kill you.”

MALE REPORTER:

Repeatedly President Biden has urged the Afghan army to fight, but it hasn’t.

MALE REPORTER:

We don’t actually have a police force at the moment. I mean, as soldiers withdrew, police officers we know actually got rid of their uniforms and put on civilian clothes.

HAMDULLAH MOHIB:

The collapse started. There is no protective force in Kabul anymore. The police have abandoned their checkpoints. When I hear this, that’s when I reach the conclusion that this is the time. The president either leaves alive now or never.

We go to his residence, and I told him that it was time. And he understood.

MARTIN SMITH:

What did he say?

HAMDULLAH MOHIB:

He asked to go upstairs to collect some of his belongings, and I told him, “No.” I said, “Forget it.” He wanted to go and put on his shoes and I said, “We will grab your shoes. You get in the car.”

MARTIN SMITH:

Ghani and Mohib boarded a helicopter minutes later.

MALE REPORTER:

President Ashraf Ghani has gone, fleeing to neighboring Uzbekistan. In a Facebook post he said he’d left to avoid bloodshed.

MALE REPORTER:

The situation is moving so fast, all U.N. staff confined to their compound.

MALE REPORTER:

The Taliban are pulling the noose tighter, if you like, around the city.

MARTIN SMITH:

Within hours of Ghani’s departure, the Taliban had breached the presidential compound.

FEMALE REPORTER:

The Taliban were filmed inside the presidential palace—

MALE REPORTER:

Taliban fighters walking the hallways, declaring the restoration of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

MALE REPORTER:

These are amazing scenes.

MARTIN SMITH:

When they reached Ghani’s desk they praised Allah for their victory, reciting from the Quran.

Senior Taliban leader Anas Haqqani remembers the day.

ANAS HAQQANI:

[Speaking Pashto] It was definitely a day of happiness. For us, it was a matter of pride and joy to be there at that moment. Not only was it pleasing for us, but for the entire nation. Every day we enjoy this freedom. And future generations will too, God willing.

MARTIN SMITH:

Across the country, young Taliban foot soldiers would now be in charge. Surreal scenes of Taliban taking over ornate homes, lounging on gold-plated furniture, were posted online.

MALE REPORTER:

Afghanistan has new masters. Twenty years after their first experiment in power came to a shattering end, the Taliban are back.

MARTIN SMITH:

What happened over the next few days would surprise everyone.

MALE REPORTER:

It’s been a bewildering few weeks, but I don’t think even the Taliban could have anticipated the pace of events over the last 24 hours.

GEN. DOUGLAS LUTE, Dep. National Security Adviser, 2007-13:

We imagined that this was just a house of cards and it collapsed, and there was little warning. I actually think the fuse here was lighted about 15 years earlier. And this is the fuse that led to the implosion of the Afghan state.

MUHAMMAD SUHAIL SHAHEEN, Taliban spokesman:

We want to avoid bloodshed and destruction of properties of the people—

MARTIN SMITH:

The Taliban initially promised the takeover would be peaceful. But with confusion and chaos mounting, the Taliban quickly resorted to force.

MALE REPORTER:

Right now the Taliban are bringing hundreds of extra fighters in from neighboring provinces to try and bring security to the streets.

MALE REPORTER:

The airport now overrun as massive crowds surge onto the tarmac, desperate to get out of the country.

MARTIN SMITH:

The Kabul airport was the only area still controlled by U.S. forces, who had begun the messy process of airlifting over 120,000 coalition and Afghan civilians to safety.

DAVID PETRAEUS:

Young men and women in uniform end up being the hand of God, because they’ve picked somebody out of the crowd and send them through. They’re going to a much better life. And all the others that are left know that they’re condemned to life under the Taliban.

We left many tens of thousands of special immigrant visa applicants and holders plus their family members. You know, this is—We have a moral obligation to individuals who fought on the ground with our soldiers as translators, who shared hardship and risk with them. And we left them.

MALE REPORTER:

What looks like a disaster movie was all too real. It’s fact, not fiction, that these Afghans were so frightened they were willing to take their chances clinging to a departing American transport plane rather than staying here. But as a bid for survival, it was doomed. Several men plunged to their deaths as the jets climbed and U.S. personnel left this fiasco behind them.

PAYANDA MOHAMMAD:

[Speaking Pashto] We couldn’t believe the news. We didn’t know that he’d even gone to the airport. We thought he went to work at his clinic.

MARTIN SMITH:

On the outskirts of Kabul, I met the father of Fada Mohammad, a young dentist who fell to his death on Aug. 16.

How old was he when he died?

PAYANDA MOHAMMAD:

[Speaking Pashto] Twenty-five.

MARTIN SMITH:

Twenty-five.

PAYANDA MOHAMMAD:

[Speaking Pashto] When they were trying to climb up to the plane, the door closed on them so they were stuck there. They could not get off the plane, nor could they get inside.

MARTIN SMITH:

Why do you believe he was so desperate to get out that he would try to hang on to the outside of a plane?

PAYANDA MOHAMMAD:

[Speaking Pashto] He left so suddenly, so I wonder if he was under some sort of threat. Who makes a sudden decision like this?

MARTIN SMITH:

I’m very sorry for your loss, but thank you for taking the time to sit down and talk to us.

JOHN SOPKO:

When I saw those kids grabbing onto an airplane leaving, I mean, that brought back memories of Vietnam. I’m old enough to remember. I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed. How we handled the withdrawal, it’s an embarrassment to say you’re an American.

JOE BIDEN:

I stand squarely behind my decision.

MARTIN SMITH:

As the news coming out of Kabul was getting worse, President Biden, in a defiant speech, placed the blame on Afghanistan.

JOE BIDEN:

The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight. If anything, the developments of the past week reinforce that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.

COL. JASON DEMPSEY, U.S. Army, 1993-2015:

That was very disappointing, to hear Joe Biden blame the Afghans. These guys believed in us, and we let them down. We failed them.

MARTIN SMITH:

Ten days after Biden’s speech, a suicide bomber slipped into the huge crowd gathered outside the airport.

MALE REPORTER:

Details still emerging on this, but there was at least one explosion close to the Abbey Gate entrance to the airport. Some video being shared online show piles and piles of dead bodies. So expect those casualty figures to rise, unfortunately.

MARTIN SMITH:

Around 170 Afghans and 13 American service members died in the bombing.

FEMALE REPORTER:

Minutes after the blast, a U.S. drone records the catastrophic aftermath.

MARTIN SMITH:

A Taliban rival calling itself ISIS-K claimed responsibility for the attack.

FEMALE REPORTER:

—20 pounds of explosives on the bomber.

MARTIN SMITH:

The U.S. responded by striking a parked car in Kabul with a drone. It turned out that 10 innocent Afghan civilians were killed.

GEN. MARK MILLEY, Chmn., Joint Chiefs of Staff:

At least of those people killed was a ISIS facilitator. So, were there others killed? Yes. There are others killed. Who they are, we don’t know. We’ll try to sort through all that. I don’t want to influence the outcome of an investigation, but at this point we think that the procedures were correctly followed and it was a righteous strike.

FEMALE REPORTER:

The target, a white sedan that had been under U.S. military surveillance for the past eight hours. It had just driven into the residential compound with father of seven and NGO worker Zemari Ahmadi behind the wheel.

MARTIN SMITH:

The strike didn’t just kill the father. Seven children were also dead.

The Pentagon’s investigation revealed that no ISIS militants were at the scene.

JASON DEMPSEY:

Not only did we kill the wrong person and a bunch of innocent kids, but in the aftermath, in the days that followed, we insisted it was a righteous kill. And only because we had a free and open media that was in there digging was the military ever even forced to confront the fact that maybe we were wrong.

FEMALE REPORTER:

The Taliban has officially declared victory in Afghanistan after all U.S. troops left the country.

MARTIN SMITH:

The last U.S. troops left Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021, officially ending America’s longest war. Nearly 2,400 American service members died in Afghanistan. More than 3,900 U.S. contractors also died.

Over 115,000 Afghan fighters from both sides were killed, as were nearly 50,000 Afghan civilians.

For all the lives and money spent, over $2 trillion, Afghanistan has now regressed to what it was before America came here in the wake of 9/11. It’s a pariah state. The only country in the world where women are denied an education. A country where most women cannot go to work. Where there are strict dress codes for both women and men. Where most music is banned. Where scores upon scores of independent news outlets have been shuttered. It’s a country where homosexuality can be punishable by death. Where a man can be executed and left to hang in the public square.

Also, the Taliban’s ties to Al Qaeda appear intact. When a U.S. drone strike took out bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, last July, Zawahiri was living in a house owned by a close aide to the Taliban’s powerful Minister of the Interior Sirajuddin Haqqani—a clear violation of the Doha peace agreement they signed.

Virtually no promises made by the Taliban have been kept. But their leaders insist things are better.

ANAS HAQQANI:

[Speaking Pashto] People are feeling happiness. These problems will be solved, but not in one day. The issue of hunger and other problems will be solved in due time, God willing. There is nothing to worry about.

MARTIN SMITH:

By the latest count, over 1 million Afghans have fled the country. Thousands more are trying to escape every day.

The Taliban, a small minority, hold the great majority of Afghans in their grip.

“The invasion is over. We are free.”

NADER NADERY:

The Afghans failed. We failed. We failed because of wrong policies of our international partners, because of shortsightedness of our leaders, because we could not build institutions to withstand the times like that. And we owe it to people to accept that this was on our part a catastrophic failure. And I think it’s a catastrophic failure for the U.S. also.

DOUGLAS LUTE:

We have a responsibility to understand our role in leading to this tragedy. And I reject the simple idea, I think overly simplistic conclusion, that we could have just stayed indefinitely and avoided this.

JOE BIDEN:

War and conflict, death and loss. They’re a part of the American story. All those we honor today gave their lives for their country, but they live forever in our hearts—forever proud, forever honorable, forever American.

JASON DEMPSEY:

I was a believer in the mission. I was. I was a full believer. There was this idea that we were going to make something happen. I thought it was possible. And I had met enough Afghans that I really respected, that I saw their dedication to their country and I thought, wow, we owe it to these guys to give them something better.

MARTIN SMITH:

But what do you say to those young American Marines and soldiers who were willing to give their lives, who were fighting—

JASON DEMPSEY:

Mm-hmm.

MARTIN SMITH:

—in Afghanistan, at great risk?

JASON DEMPSEY:

Ultimately, what you have to say to the young soldier, sailor, airman, Marine is, “Thank you for stepping up and believing in America, but we failed you. Your leaders failed you. Your military leaders failed you. Your political leaders failed you.” And let’s not say, “Oh, well, at the end of the day, it was worth it.” It wasn’t. It was not worth it. We wasted billions upon billions of dollars, thousands of lives, both ours and Afghans, and we did not achieve what we wanted to achieve. And let’s not pretend otherwise.

MARTIN SMITH:

But we did do some good things, did we not?

JASON DEMPSEY:

We did. We did. We kicked out the Taliban originally. We ran Al Qaeda out. But then, in wanting everything, we ultimately got close to nothing.

ARIFA:

This is an English book from school. I should know English because it’s an international language and it can help me become a doctor in the future.

MARTIN SMITH:

Secondary schools for girls have remained closed for over a year and a half. Fifteen-year-old Arifa began studying in her living room after the Taliban takeover.

ARIFA:

[Speaking Dari] I want to help my people and my society. I want to serve them. If they don’t allow us to study, who will serve our people? Who will be the doctors and the teachers?

When my brother goes off to school I feel like I’m no longer able to grow. Like I no longer belong in this country.

Arifa has since escaped to France.

Munisa Mubariz is now in Pakistan.

Zahra remains in Afghanistan.

Part One

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Martin Smith & Marcela Gaviria

PRODUCED BY Brian Funck Marcela Gaviria Martin Smith

CORRESPONDENT Martin Smith

EDITED BY Brian Funck

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Part Two

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Marcela Gaviria & Martin Smith

PRODUCED BY Brian Funck Marcela Gaviria Martin Smith

CORRESPONDENT Martin Smith

EDITED BY Brian Funck

CO-PRODUCER Scott Anger

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY Scott Anger Timothy Grucza

FIELD PRODUCER Masood Shnizai

ASSOCIATE PRODUCERS Sasha Schell Elizabeth Hope Williams

REPORTER Bilal Sarwary

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ARCHIVAL PRODUCER Kate McCormick

RESEARCHER Fahim Abed

LOCAL PRODUCERS Sadiqullah Afghan Hassan Sahak

FIELD SUPPORT Askil Khan Kakar Hekmat Mosazai

ONLINE EDITOR/COLORISTS David Bigelow Jim Ferguson

SOUND MIX Jim Sullivan

LINE PRODUCER Amy Carter

ART DIRECTOR V. Stephanie Carendi

GRAPHICS Alisa Placas Fruitman

TRANSLATION Fahim Abed Samim Ahmad Khwaga Ghani

ADDITIONAL TRANSLATION Muqtader Omari

PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Téa DiPrima

ADDITIONAL RESEARCH John Campopiano Stevie Jones Maddie Kornfeld

NARRATION RECORD Greg Castro Johnny Anderes

ARCHIVAL MATERIALS Aamir Qureshi / AFP via Getty Images AFP via Getty Images Arif Ali / AFG via Getty Images Asghar Achakzai / AFP via Getty Images Banaras Khan /AFP via Getty Images Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg via Getty Images Cyrus McCrimmon/The Denver Post via Getty Images David Furst / AFP via Getty Images DigitalGlobe / Maxar via Getty Images Farooq Naeem / AFP via Getty Images Global Archive Uk / Image Bank Film via Getty Images ITN / ITN via Getty Images John Moore/Getty Images via Getty Images Majid Saeedi/Getty Images via Getty Images Nisian Hughes / Image Bank Film via Getty Images Paramount Pictures / Paramount Pictures via Getty Images Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images via Getty Images Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images Sean Gallup/Getty Images via Getty Images Sony Pictures Entertainment / Sony Pictures Entertainment via Getty Images STR/AFP via Getty Images U.S. Army via Getty Images Vice News / Vice Media via Getty Images Vyacheslav Oseledko / AFP via Getty Images

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS Channel 4 CNN Euronews Fox News France 24 Intel Center ITN NBC News PBS NewsHour The New York Times The Seattle Times The Washington Post

ORIGINAL PRODUCTION FUNDING PROVIDED BY Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Abrams Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Park Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler through the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, additional support from Laura DeBonis and Corey David Sauer.

FOR FRONTLINE

DIRECTOR OF POST PRODUCTION Megan McGough Christian

SENIOR EDITOR Barry Clegg

EDITOR Brenna Verre

EDITOR Joey Mullin

ASSISTANT EDITORS Christine Giordano Alex LaGore Tim Meagher Peter Norton

PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Stevie Jones

FOR GBH OUTPOST SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY Tim Mangini

INTERNS Caroline Rangel Gomes Jelina Liu Tara Suter

SERIES MUSIC Mason Daring Martin Brody

EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT Will Farrell

DIRECTOR OF IMPACT AND EXTERNAL RELATIONS Erika Howard

SENIOR DIGITAL WRITER Patrice Taddonio

PUBLICITY & AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT COORDINATOR Julia Heffernan

DIGITAL PRODUCER / EDITOR Tessa Maguire

MANAGER, PUBLIC RELATIONS AND COMMUNICATIONS Anne Husted

PODCAST PRODUCER Emily Pisacreta

ARCHIVES & RIGHTS MANAGER John Campopiano

BUSINESS ASSOCIATE Sean Gigliotti

CONTRACTS CONSULTANT Junshi Lu

FOR GBH LEGAL Eric Brass Suzy Carrington Jay Fialkov

SENIOR CONTRACTS MANAGER Gianna DeGiulio

BUSINESS MANAGER Sue Tufts

BUSINESS DIRECTOR Mary Sullivan

SENIOR DEVELOPER Anthony DeLorenzo

LEAD DESIGNER FOR DIGITAL Dan Nolan

FRONTLINE/COLUMBIA JOURNALISM SCHOOL FELLOWSHIPS TOW JOURNALISM FELLOW Chantelle Lee

ABRAMS JOURNALISM FELLOW Julia Ingram

FRONTLINE/NEWMARK JOURNALISM SCHOOL AT CUNY FELLOWSHIP TOW JOURNALISM FELLOW James O’Donnell

FRONTLINE/FIRELIGHT INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM FELLOWS Kevin Shaw Débora Souza Silva

DIGITAL REPORTER Bruce Gil

EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS Lauren Prestileo Amy Rubin Callie T. Wiser

SENIOR DIGITAL PRODUCER / EDITOR Miles Alvord

HOLLYHOCK FILMMAKERS IN RESIDENCE Christina Avalos Marcia Robiou

SENIOR DOCUMENTARY EDITOR & PRODUCER Michelle Mizner

DIGITAL EDITOR Priyanka Boghani

EDITORIAL COORDINATING PRODUCER Katherine Griwert

POST COORDINATING PRODUCER Robin Parmelee

SENIOR EDITOR AT LARGE Louis Wiley Jr.

FOUNDER David Fanning

SPECIAL COUNSEL Dale Cohen

DIRECTOR OF AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT Maria Diokno

SENIOR PRODUCERS Dan Edge Frank Koughan

SENIOR PRODUCER, SPECIAL PROJECTS & INNOVATION Carla Borrás

SENIOR EDITOR & DIRECTOR, LOCAL JOURNALISM Erin Texeira

SENIOR SERIES PRODUCER Nina Chaudry

SENIOR EDITOR INVESTIGATIONS Lauren Ezell Kinlaw

MANAGING DIRECTOR Janice Hui

MANAGING EDITOR Andrew Metz

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Raney Aronson-Rath

A FRONTLINE production with RAIN Media

© 2023 WGBH Educational Foundation All Rights Reserved

FRONTLINE is a production of GBH which is solely responsible for its content.

Part Three

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Marcela Gaviria & Martin Smith

PRODUCED BY Brian Funck Marcela Gaviria Martin Smith

CORRESPONDENT Martin Smith

EDITED BY Brian Funck

CO-PRODUCER Scott Anger

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY Scott Anger Jordan Bryon

ASSOCIATE PRODUCERS Elizabeth Hope Williams Sasha Schell

FIELD PRODUCER Masood Shnizai

REPORTER Bilal Sarwary

ORIGINAL MUSIC Francois-Paul Aiche

ARCHIVAL PRODUCER Kate McCormick

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Charles Farrell

ADDITIONAL EDITING Lindsay Utz

ONLINE EDITOR/COLORIST Jim Ferguson

SOUND MIX Jim Sullivan

RESEARCHER Fahim Abed

GRAPHICS Alisa Placas Fruitman

LOCAL PRODUCERS Sadiqullah Afghan Hassan Sahak

FIELD SUPPORT Askil Khan Kakar Hekmat Mosazai

LINE PRODUCER Amy Carter

ART DIRECTOR V. Stephanie Carendi

TRANSLATION Fahim Abed Samim Ahmad Khwaga Ghani

ADDITIONAL TRANSLATION Muqtader Omari

PRODUCTION SUPPORT Christine Canedo Téa DiPrima

ADDITIONAL RESEARCH John Campopiano Stevie Jones

NARRATION RECORD Greg Castro Johnny Anderes

ARCHIVAL CREDITS ABC News AFPTV via Getty Images Alamy Al Drago / Getty Images Alex Wong/ Getty Images Al Jazeera Anadolu Agency via Getty Images Aref Karimi/AFP via Getty Images Asef Shalizi Khan – Ataurrahman Nasinas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images Associated Press Axiom BBC Motion Gallery Editorial/BBC News via Getty Images Brian Schroeder / U.S. Army via Getty Images Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images CNN C-SPAN FedNet via Getty Images Geoff Tompkinson / Iconica Video via Getty Images Getty Images Giuseppe Cacace / AFP via Getty Images ITN via Getty Images Karim Jaafar / AFP via Getty Images Kate Brooks Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Mark Andersen / Photolibrary Video via Getty Images NewsHour Productions/Getty Images Nexstar – WGN, Chicago / Nexstar via Getty Images Noorullah Shirzada / AFP via Getty images Patrick Robert / Sygma via Getty Images Paula Bronstein / Getty Images Pond 5 Sajjad Hussain / AFP via Getty Images Screenocean/Reuters Screenocean/Reuters/Hamid Mir Screenocean/Reuters/Ibraheem al Omari Screenocean/Reuters/Mohammad Ismail Shah Marai AFP via Getty Images Shutterstock Sony Pictures Entertainment via Getty Images The Guardian TOLO UN Photo US Department of State / Handout / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images Veritone Wakil Kohsar / AFP via Getty Images

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS A24 News BBC News ITV News NBC News Sky News The New York Times The Wall Street Journal The Washington Post TRT World USA Today WION

ORIGINAL PRODUCTION FUNDING PROVIDED BY Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Abrams Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Park Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler through the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, additional support from Laura DeBonis and Corey David Sauer.

FOR FRONTLINE

DIRECTOR OF POST PRODUCTION Megan McGough Christian

SENIOR EDITOR Barry Clegg

EDITOR Brenna Verre

EDITOR Joey Mullin

ASSISTANT EDITORS Christine Giordano Alex LaGore Tim Meagher Peter Norton

PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Stevie Jones

FOR GBH OUTPOST SENIOR DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY Tim Mangini

INTERNS Caroline Rangel Gomes Jelina Liu Tara Suter

SERIES MUSIC Mason Daring Martin Brody

EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT Will Farrell

DIRECTOR OF IMPACT AND EXTERNAL RELATIONS Erika Howard

SENIOR DIGITAL WRITER Patrice Taddonio

PUBLICITY & AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT COORDINATOR Julia Heffernan

DIGITAL PRODUCER / EDITOR Tessa Maguire

MANAGER, PUBLIC RELATIONS AND COMMUNICATIONS Anne Husted

PODCAST PRODUCER Emily Pisacreta

ARCHIVES & RIGHTS MANAGER John Campopiano

BUSINESS ASSOCIATE Sean Gigliotti

CONTRACTS CONSULTANT Junshi Lu

FOR GBH LEGAL Eric Brass Suzy Carrington Jay Fialkov

SENIOR CONTRACTS MANAGER Gianna DeGiulio

BUSINESS MANAGER Sue Tufts

BUSINESS DIRECTOR Mary Sullivan

SENIOR DEVELOPER Anthony DeLorenzo

LEAD DESIGNER FOR DIGITAL Dan Nolan

FRONTLINE/COLUMBIA JOURNALISM SCHOOL FELLOWSHIPS TOW JOURNALISM FELLOW Chantelle Lee

ABRAMS JOURNALISM FELLOW Julia Ingram

FRONTLINE/NEWMARK JOURNALISM SCHOOL AT CUNY FELLOWSHIP TOW JOURNALISM FELLOW James O’Donnell

FRONTLINE/FIRELIGHT INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM FELLOWS Kevin Shaw Débora Souza Silva

DIGITAL REPORTER Bruce Gil

EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS Lauren Prestileo Amy Rubin Callie T. Wiser

SENIOR DIGITAL PRODUCER / EDITOR Miles Alvord

HOLLYHOCK FILMMAKERS IN RESIDENCE Christina Avalos Marcia Robiou

SENIOR DOCUMENTARY EDITOR & PRODUCER Michelle Mizner

DIGITAL EDITOR Priyanka Boghani

EDITORIAL COORDINATING PRODUCER Katherine Griwert

POST COORDINATING PRODUCER Robin Parmelee

SENIOR EDITOR AT LARGE Louis Wiley Jr.

FOUNDER David Fanning

SPECIAL COUNSEL Dale Cohen

DIRECTOR OF AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT Maria Diokno

SENIOR PRODUCERS Dan Edge Frank Koughan

SENIOR PRODUCER, SPECIAL PROJECTS & INNOVATION Carla Borrás

SENIOR EDITOR & DIRECTOR, LOCAL JOURNALISM Erin Texeira

SENIOR SERIES PRODUCER Nina Chaudry

SENIOR EDITOR INVESTIGATIONS Lauren Ezell Kinlaw

MANAGING DIRECTOR Janice Hui

MANAGING EDITOR Andrew Metz

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Raney Aronson-Rath

A FRONTLINE production with RAIN Media

© 2023 WGBH Educational Foundation All Rights Reserved

FRONTLINE is a production of GBH which is solely responsible for its content.