On Thursday evening, thousands of people were still gathered outside Kabul airport, hoping to escape Afghanistan before the final American troops leave.
Then a bomb exploded at Abbey Gate.
An ISIS-K suicide bomber attacked the crowd outside the airport, killing 13 American service members and scores of Afghan civilians. Many of the Afghans killed were standing exactly where they had been standing for days: outside the airport gates, waiting for the possibility of evacuation.
The attack is horrifying by itself. But politically, it also reveals how much more complicated Afghanistan has become in only two weeks.
The Taliban controls Kabul. The United States controls the airport inside Kabul. American soldiers and Taliban fighters, enemies for twenty years, have effectively been operating on opposite sides of the same evacuation perimeter. And now both face another enemy: the Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate, ISIS-K.
The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 because a terrorist organisation operating from the country had attacked America. Twenty years later, as America finally leaves, another terrorist organisation has killed American troops at the airport from which they are departing.
The war is ending. The problem that began it has not.
That does not necessarily mean America should stay. But it does make the meaning of “ending the war” much less simple.
ISIS-K is not the Taliban. That distinction is important because the words “Taliban”, “al-Qaeda” and “Islamic State” are often grouped together as though they describe slightly different versions of the same organisation. They do not.
ISIS-K emerged in Afghanistan and Pakistan several years ago as an affiliate of Islamic State. It is ideologically hostile to the Taliban and has fought Taliban forces. ISIS-K considers the Taliban insufficiently extreme and rejects the Taliban’s nationalist focus on governing Afghanistan in favour of Islamic State’s much broader vision of a transnational caliphate.
That means Taliban victory has not united Afghanistan’s armed Islamist movements. It has created a new political hierarchy among them.
The Taliban spent twenty years as the insurgency attacking the government. Now it is becoming the government that insurgents attack.
There is a strange symmetry to that.
For years, Taliban fighters could exploit the weaknesses of the Afghan state. They could attack checkpoints, assassinate officials and disappear into areas where government authority was limited. Kabul had to defend ministries, roads, electricity infrastructure, schools, airports and civilians. The Taliban could choose where and when to attack.
Now those responsibilities increasingly belong to the Taliban.
ISIS-K only has to find one weakness.
The Taliban has to defend everything.
That is one of the fundamental asymmetries between insurgency and government. Destroying order requires considerably fewer resources than maintaining it. A government can prevent 99 attacks and still be judged by the one it fails to prevent. An insurgent organisation needs only one successful attack to demonstrate that the government cannot guarantee security.
Thursday’s bombing may therefore be an early demonstration of how different Taliban rule will be from Taliban insurgency.
The attack also complicates America’s final days in Afghanistan in an almost surreal way. US officials had warned that an ISIS-K attack was possible. American forces were trying to evacuate tens of thousands of people through an airport surrounded by territory controlled by the Taliban. That meant some degree of practical coordination with the Taliban was unavoidable.
Two weeks ago, American forces were withdrawing because the Taliban had won.
This week, American and Taliban interests briefly overlap because both want ISIS-K prevented from attacking the airport.
That does not make them allies. It demonstrates something more interesting about international politics: relationships between political actors are rarely permanently defined by the labels “friend” and “enemy”.
Interests can overlap without values overlapping.
America still fundamentally opposes much of what the Taliban represents. The Taliban still spent twenty years fighting American troops. But both currently have an interest in preventing ISIS-K from disrupting the evacuation.
That is not friendship. It is a transaction.
And sometimes transactions between enemies are necessary.
President Biden responded to Thursday’s attack by promising that the United States would pursue those responsible. On Friday, the US carried out a drone strike in eastern Afghanistan against an ISIS-K target.
This introduces another difficult question. If American troops are leaving Afghanistan, how does America continue preventing terrorist organisations there from threatening it?
The Biden administration argues that the United States can maintain what it calls an “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism capability: intelligence, drones and other military assets operating without a permanent troop presence inside Afghanistan.
In theory, that allows America to separate two objectives that became entangled over twenty years. It can stop occupying Afghanistan while still targeting organisations that directly threaten the United States.
That sounds strategically attractive.
Thursday’s attack also demonstrates why it may be extremely difficult.
Drone strikes depend on intelligence. Intelligence becomes harder when you no longer have thousands of soldiers, intelligence officers and local partners operating throughout the country. A drone can strike a target from hundreds of kilometres away. It still needs somebody to identify the correct target.
Technology can extend military reach.
It cannot eliminate the need to know what you are looking at.
That distinction will become increasingly important after withdrawal. The United States is leaving behind the physical infrastructure through which much of its information about Afghanistan was collected. It will therefore have to attempt to understand threats from much farther away.
This is not necessarily impossible. It is simply less reassuring than the phrase “over the horizon” makes it sound.
There is also an uncomfortable implication for the Taliban. If it wants international recognition, preventing Afghanistan from becoming a base for international terrorist organisations will be one of the most important tests it faces.
The Taliban has repeatedly said that Afghan territory will not be used to threaten other countries. That promise matters because its previous relationship with al-Qaeda was one of the principal reasons the United States invaded Afghanistan in the first place.
Now the Taliban has an incentive to prove that it can control organisations operating inside the country.
ISIS-K has an incentive to prove that it cannot.
Thursday’s attack therefore targeted more than the airport. It challenged the Taliban’s claim that it can provide security.
This is one reason terrorism can be politically effective even when terrorist organisations possess relatively little conventional military power. ISIS-K cannot defeat the United States military in battle. It probably cannot defeat the Taliban conventionally across Afghanistan either.
It doesn’t need to.
A single attacker reached a crowd outside an airport and changed the political discussion around the entire withdrawal.
Thirteen American families lost service members. Scores of Afghan families lost relatives. Biden now faces another wave of criticism over the evacuation. The Taliban faces questions about whether it can control Kabul. Foreign governments have another reason to fear what Afghanistan may become.
One person carrying explosives can therefore produce political effects completely disproportionate to their military strength.
That is the logic of terrorism.
Its target is not only the people killed.
Its target is everyone watching.
The attack also makes the evacuation itself even more morally difficult. Every day the airport remains open gives more people an opportunity to escape. Every day large crowds remain outside it gives ISIS-K another possible target.
Closing access protects against another attack but leaves vulnerable Afghans behind. Keeping access open preserves an escape route but exposes crowds and soldiers to extraordinary danger.
Again, there is no clean option.
This has become a recurring feature of the withdrawal. Almost every decision involves transferring risk rather than eliminating it. Remove troops and Afghan institutions become more vulnerable. Keep troops and American soldiers remain exposed. Keep the airport gates open and civilians can reach evacuation flights. Close them and people outside may never leave.
Political decisions are often described as solutions.
Sometimes they are only decisions about where the remaining danger will fall.
There is another reason Thursday’s attack should change how we think about the Taliban’s victory.
The Taliban has won control of Afghanistan, but that does not mean Afghanistan has achieved peace.
Civil wars do not always end because one side captures the capital. Sometimes the structure of the conflict changes.
ISIS-K can continue attacking.
Anti-Taliban resistance may continue elsewhere.
Local armed groups remain.
The Taliban itself contains different factions whose priorities may not always be identical.
The absence of an American-backed government therefore does not automatically produce a unified political order.
This distinction matters because we often imagine war and peace as two separate conditions. Soldiers are fighting, then an agreement is signed or a capital falls, and peace begins.
Reality is less tidy.
Violence can decline without disappearing. One war can end while another begins. Former insurgents can become governments while new insurgents emerge against them.
Afghanistan may be moving through exactly that transition.
And then there is Biden.
The deaths of 13 American service members will inevitably intensify criticism of his withdrawal. Some of that criticism is deserved, particularly concerning the speed of the evacuation and the administration’s failure to anticipate how quickly the Afghan government would collapse.
But Thursday’s attack should not automatically become evidence that withdrawal itself was wrong.
That argument requires another step.
Would keeping American forces in Afghanistan have prevented terrorism permanently, or would it have continued exposing American troops to terrorist attacks indefinitely?
Those are not the same question.
The attack demonstrates that terrorism remains a threat.
It does not automatically demonstrate that permanent military occupation is the best response to that threat.
This distinction is politically difficult because tragedy creates pressure for certainty. After people are killed, saying “the policy is complicated” sounds evasive.
But grief does not make causation simpler.
The United States should investigate what security failures allowed the attack. It should pursue those responsible within the limits of international law and civilian protection. It should examine whether the evacuation should have begun earlier.
It should not automatically conclude that every death proves twenty more years of war would have been preferable.
That would confuse the cost of leaving with proof that staying had no cost.
Perhaps this is the hardest lesson Afghanistan has produced for me over the last several months.
There may be no policy that makes America completely safe from events inside Afghanistan.
Occupation did not eliminate terrorism.
Withdrawal will not eliminate terrorism.
Drone strikes will not eliminate terrorism.
Diplomacy will not eliminate terrorism.
The objective of policy may therefore have to be reducing threats rather than imagining they can be permanently removed.
That sounds less satisfying than “defeat terrorism”.
It may be considerably more realistic.
The United States has spent twenty years trying to create an Afghanistan in which organisations capable of threatening America could not operate freely. It is now attempting to pursue that objective without controlling the country.
The Taliban has spent twenty years trying to remove foreign forces and return to power. It has accomplished both, only to discover that controlling Afghanistan makes it responsible for preventing other armed movements from doing exactly what the Taliban itself did for two decades.
And ordinary Afghans remain caught between all of them.
That is what Thursday’s attack makes impossible to ignore.
Thirteen American service members were killed while trying to evacuate people from a war America was ending. Roughly 160 Afghans were killed while trying to escape the government that had just won that war. (Reuters)
There is no victory in that sentence.
Only the reminder that wars can have official endings long before their consequences end.
America’s final troops are supposed to leave Afghanistan within days. When they do, politicians will describe America’s longest war as over.
For the United States military, it will be.
For Afghanistan, I am no longer sure that “over” is the right word.
