I was a teenage Afghan refugee in Pakistan’s tribal areas when the Twin Towers fell. Almost nobody around us understood the politics of what had happened, but we knew that something had changed for good. Afghanistan, which until then had been our private tragedy and our first exile from Taliban rule, had suddenly become the world’s concern, with the United States leading the response.
Twenty years later, I was the Afghan ambassador in the United Arab Emirates when Kabul fell to the Taliban and the plane carrying the Afghan president landed in Abu Dhabi. Within days, the U.S.-backed republic no longer existed while I still carried its title. Those two periods frame nearly my entire adult life, just as they mark the beginning and bitter end of America’s longest war. For most Americans and Afghans, it is impossible to think about one without the other.
As the 25th anniversary of September 11 approaches, and five years since the Taliban takeover, the uncomfortable lesson from both episodes is that overreach and indifference each carry a price. America paid one for trying to remake Afghanistan after 2001. It paid another when it left in 2021, assuming that ignoring Afghanistan would make it less relevant and its threats easier and cheaper to contain from a distance. Both choices carried serious consequences. I was reminded of that history recently in a meeting with President George W. Bush, as we talked about the post-9/11 Afghanistan campaign. The conversation reinforced for me how deeply the choices Washington faces today remain tied to the threats that led to that tragic day, even as those threats have evolved.
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