Year in Review: How Afghanistan Withdrawal Continued to Haunt Washington in 2022

Afghani refugees housed at US bases after being evacuated from Kabul in the chaotic final days of August 2021 caused some $259.5 million in damage to facilities and equipment. That’s according to a Pentagon audit report published last week summarizing the unexpected costs of Operation Allies Welcome and Operation Allies Refuge.

The report is the latest awkward admission by US authorities related to the Afghan pullout, but far from the first story of its kind this year. Throughout 2022, dozens of embarrassing insights about the US-led occupation, and details about Washington’s illegal behavior after its withdrawal, have emerged.

Earlier this month, Afghan President Hamid Karzai appeared to confirm WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s oft-quoted assertion that the US-led war in Afghanistan was never about democracy or nation-building, but a strategy of using the country to “wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe” into the hands of the “transnational security elite.”

According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, the war in Afghanistan cost American taxpayers alone over $2.3 trillion, or the equivalent of $300 million a day for nearly 20 years.

Karzai, 65, served as Afghanistan’s president from 2002-2014. Unlike his successor, Ashraf Ghani, who reportedly fled Afghanistan with suitcases full of money, Karzai has remained in his home country, regularly calling for international action to assist Afghans in the face of the severe economic and humanitarian crisis pummeling the country.

The United States left behind tens of billions of dollars in advanced military hardware in Afghanistan during its exit, with Pentagon spokesman John Kirby boasting as late as August 11, 2021 - fewer than 100 hours before Kabul’s collapse, that the US and NATO had forged the Afghan military into one of the best equipped and trained militaries in the world over 20 years.

So much equipment was left behind that auditors have had difficulty tracking it, with former President Donald Trump alleging the figure to be as high as $85 billion. A Pentagon report released this past April claimed the amount to be a far more modest $7 billion, including aircraft, vehicles, thousands of tons of guns and ammunition, and communications equipment.

However, a study by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction in November found that the Pentagon’s April report provided only “limited, inaccurate, and untimely information about the defense articles it left behind,” and that in reality, the US military simply has no clue how much weaponry it inadvertently gifted the Taliban last year.

2022 also saw confirmation that at least some of the weapons delivered by the US and its allies to Afghanistan has been trickling abroad, with Indian media reporting on advanced small arms, ammunition, night vision devices and other equipment from US stocks being used by militants in Kashmir. Additional reporting has determined that weapons smuggling has become a booming business in Afghanistan, threatening to leave US-made arms in the hands of not only regional insurgents, but terrorists and criminal groups.

2022 has also been a year of growing international pressure on Washington over the fate of the $7 billion in Afghan state assets that the US has kept frozen in its coffers. The Biden administration’s move this past February to split the $7 billion Afghan Central Bank cushion into a $3.5 billion ‘humanitarian trust’ and a $3.5 billion fund to pay the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks sparked outrage from the Taliban and ordinary Afghans, who accused Washington of pilfering the nation’s wealth while Afghanistan finds itself in the midst of a humanitarian crisis.

The Taliban, which doesn’t recognize US assertions about al-Qaeda’s** involvement in 9/11, has slammed the US decision to split the fund as a “showcase” of America’s “human and moral decline.” Hamid Karzai has also slammed the US for its heartlessness, stressing in February that the $7 billion “belongs to the people of Afghanistan,” and that ordinary Afghans had nothing to do with 9/11.

Washington has ignored the international pressure, instead transferring the remaining $3.5 billion of the reserves to a Switzerland-based “Fund for the Afghan People,” which will be tasked with doling out the money. Concurrently, the Biden administration has kept strict sanctions in place against the Taliban government, and threatening other countries with secondary restrictions if they do business with the country.

This past March, the United Nations estimated that a whopping 95 percent of Afghans don’t have access to enough food, and that thousands of children are dying or being born prematurely due to extreme poverty and a lack of access to basic medical care. An April report by a group of UN experts concluded that US sanctions are to blame for an “epic humanitarian crisis on the verge of a development catastrophe,” and that restricts have a “disproportionate impact on women and children.”

Throughout the West’s 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, the United States and its allies heavily used the status of Afghan women in their propaganda war. A 2010 cover story in Time Magazine entitled “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan” famously featured an Afghan girl who had her nose and ears severed by the Taliban as punishment for fleeing her abusive in-laws.

Of course, Western media never seemed to be too preoccupied with the fate of Afghan women in the 1980s, when the US and its allies sent billions of dollars in aid and advanced weaponry to the Mujahedeen – the Taliban’s precursors, to fight the Soviets.

In any event, the collapse of the Western-backed government in Kabul in 2021 confirmed the world’s worst fears about the fate of Afghan women under Taliban rule, with their status and rights plummeting in 2022.

In August, a Sputnik investigation uncovered a dramatic increase in domestic violence, forced and early marriages, extreme poverty among women, and the barring of girls from going to school after the sixth grade. Women have also been forced to wear face coverings, and are barred from working outside the home.

Washington’s response to the catastrophic situation has been lackluster, and centered around putting visa restrictions on Taliban officials, who seem unlikely to visit the US anyway unless it’s as part of a diplomatic delegation. As for US media, they’ve quickly forgotten about Afghan women.

The final major way that the Afghan crisis has continued to reverberate in the US in 2022 has been to demonstrate the incompetence, intransigence, inflexibility and intra-agency infighting of the US government and military machine in dealing with problems. Report after damning report published this year has detailed the extent of the problem.

In February, for example, media got their hands on a document revealing that the Biden administration was still tinkering with basic details on how to evacuate US officials and personnel and the tens of thousands of Afghans on August 14, 2021, less than 24 hours before the Taliban took Kabul. Also in February, senior Pentagon commanders revealed to media that the White House and the US Embassy in Kabul fiercely resisted the military’s attempts to prepare for an orderly evacuation.

The same month, a partially redacted slide show summary of the situation in Afghanistan by United States Central Command from September 2021 released to media revealed that even after the evacuation started, the State Department’s directive of rotating consular personnel, and delays in evacuee processing due to bureaucratic flip-flopping about eligibility requirements, was holding up the process.

The US-led War in Afghanistan lasted for nearly 7,300 days. In that time, up to 100,000 Afghan civilians, 92,000 members of the Afghan security forces, tens of thousands of Taliban fighters, over 3,500 US and coalition troops, and 4,000+ Western military contractors (i.e. mercenaries) were killed. 20,752 US service members were injured. Among the over 775,000 American troops rotated through the country over the years, as many as 50,000 have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder or severe depression. According to one troubling tally from 2021, some 30,177 US active duty personnel and veterans have died by suicide since 9/11, among them soldiers who had served in Afghanistan.

For the hundreds of thousands of US Afghan vets and their families, the moral ‘bleeding wound’ of the War in Afghanistan continued to plague them throughout 2022, with vets asking hard questions about why they served, why their brothers in arms risked their lives, died or were injured in the conflict, and just what the purpose of the war was.

This past August, as the one-year anniversary of the US pullout approached, the 28-year-old brother of one of the 13 US troops killed in the August 26, 2021 Daesh* suicide bomb attack in Kabul claimed his own life at a memorial event. The men's father was said to have been a vocal critic of Washington botched withdrawal from the country.

While most Afghanistan-related news in 2022 seems to have been dire, gloomy and depressing, one bright spot has shone through like a ray of light puncturing the dark cloud of a thunderstorm: In April, the Taliban announced a total ban on the cultivation of opium poppies – the main ingredient of synthetic opioids, including heroin.

For decades after the Soviet Union’s 1989 pullout from Afghanistan, the country served as a hotbed for opium growing, with the US-led occupation of the country in 2001 worsening the problem. Much of the heroin produced in Afghanistan found its way into Central Asia and Eastern Europe, including Russia. In 2014, Viktor Ivanov, the director of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service, estimated that Afghan heroin had killed over 500,000 Russian citizens since 2000 alone. If the Taliban makes good on its pledge to eradicate the drug’s key ingredient from Afghanistan, perhaps thousands if not tens of thousands of lives in Russia, the rest of Europe and across the world will be spared from the scourge of heroin in 2023.