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CHRISTINE FELLENZ, NGM STAFF, LAWSON PARKER
Source: Bill Roggio, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
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More than two trillion U.S. taxpayer dollars were invested and 170,000 mostly Afghan lives lost over 20 years, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University. The monumental effort was meant to support a more democratic, equitable, and inclusive government than the Taliban or the anarchy and patchwork of mujahideen and communist regimes and emirates that preceded it. What is there to show now for that high price? On Sunday, the U.S.-backed president, former World Bank official Ashraf Ghani, fled the country. Panic and gunfire in the streets followed. Terrified residents tried to empty their bank accounts and flee; women activists and civic leaders were threatened with “punishment,” according to reports; and the Pentagon sent troops to evacuate embassy staff, drawing bitter comparisons to the chaotic Fall of Saigon.
What began as a U.S. effort to hunt down a terrorist leader in Afghanistan morphed into a two-decade nation-building experiment plagued by mismanagement of aid and contracts and corruption by Afghan elites who enriched themselves at the expense of the population, as reporter Jason Motlagh and photographer Kiana Hayeri chronicle in their in-depth reporting over the past several months. Regarded by many resentful Afghans as an occupation, the persistent and ultimately ineffectual U.S. presence allowed the Taliban to portray themselves as a nationalist movement—and their Afghan rivals as puppets of the latest foreign power vainly trying to exert its influence over Afghanistan, the notorious graveyard of empires that wore down the British, the Soviets, and now the American superpower. (Pictured below, Abdul Wahab, a member of an anti-Taliban militia, who was photographed before his death when the Taliban overran his position in the Karsai Mountains in early July.)
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