Five years after the fall of Kabul, James Glancy looks back at the twenty-year war in Afghanistan and asks how the biggest military coalition NATO ever assembled ended in such complete strategic failure. Drawing on his own experience fighting in Helmand and filming in Kabul as the country collapsed in 2021, he examines the failures of counterinsurgency, corruption inside the Afghan state, the disastrous Doha Agreement and the chaotic withdrawal that culminated in the Taliban walking back into power.
But this is about so much more than Afghanistan. It’s about the West and the wars it has chosen to fight in the 21st century. Trillions of dollars have been spent, thousands of Western troops have lost their lives and Britain and America have been engaged in almost continuous military operations, while China has grown into an economic superpower. With the Taliban now controlling the whole of Afghanistan, the National Resistance Front still fighting and another American war underway in Iran, the question is whether the West has learned anything from twenty-five years of conflict, or whether it will continue to start wars without knowing how they will end.
