Three years have passed since the chaotic and shameful American exit from Afghanistan. On August 30, 2021, the last plane from the United States rolled off the runway at Kabul airport, then named after former President Hamid Karzai. The US intelligence community did not foresee the scale of the threat of a Taliban offensive.
In mid-August, fundamentalists took control of the important Bagram air base and entered the capital. There was no serious fighting in the city, the state structures linked to the Americans collapsed, and President Ashraf Ghani fled to Tajikistan. The hastily evacuated US military abandoned their equipment, and the Taliban took control of about a dozen Black Hawk helicopters. The world saw shocking images of the airport where civilians and coalition troops were evacuated, with people clinging to planes. The chaos intensified after a terrorist attack by the self-proclaimed Islamic State, which killed more than 150 people. Confidence in President Joe Biden fell to less than 50% and has never returned to the level of the first six months of his presidency.
