Four million Afghans are facing “a food emergency” and the majority live in rural areas where $36 million is urgently needed for the coming months to ensure the planting of winter wheat, feed for livestock, and cash assistance for vulnerable families, the elderly and disabled, a U.N. official said Tuesday. Rein Paulsen, director of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Office of Emergencies and Resilience, told reporters at U.N. headquarters in a video briefing from Kabul that 70% of Afghans live in rural areas and there is a severe drought affecting 7.3 million Afghans in 25 of the country’s 34 provinces. These vulnerable rural communities have also been hit by the pandemic, he said. Paulsen said 4 million Afghans are facing a humanitarian emergency, characterized by “extreme gaps in food consumption, very high levels of acute malnutrition and excess mortality.” He said agriculture is “indispensable” to the Afghan population. He said it accounts for just over 25% of the country's GDP, directly employs some 45% of the work force, “and most importantly it provides livelihood benefits for fully 80% of the Afghan population.” Read:AKDN urges international community not to abandon Afghanistan Many vulnerable families rely on livestock for food, he said, but 3 million animals are at risk as a result of the drought leaving inadequate pasture. Paulsen said the winter wheat planting season -- the most important in Afghanistan -- is threatened by “challenges of the cash and banking system” as well as challenges to markets and agricultural items. Since the Taliban takeover on Aug. 15, fears have grown that Afghanistan could face economic collapse. Many banks have been closed, those that are open have limited cash withdrawals, and prices for staples have increased. “More than half of Afghans’ daily calorific intake comes from wheat,” Paulsen said. “The crop is simply indispensable in food security terms” and farmers must start to plant now. “FAO has resources in place to support an extra 1.25 million Afghans but much more is needed,” he said. “The seeds can’t wait, the farmers can’t wait. This window is requiring an urgent scale and support for donors now.” He said the FAO’s package of wheat, fertilizer and support for a single farmer costs $150. “For $150 a family of seven Afghans will produce 1.2 million tons of wheat -- they’ll produce enough wheat to give them cereal and flour for an entire 12-month period,” Paulsen said. That $150 is “incredibly impactful, very cost effective — and again, (it) underscores why it’s imperative that we don’t miss this winter wheat season,” he added. Read: Qatar supports shipment of WHO life-saving medical supplies to Afghanistan He also said more than 400,000 Afghans are displaced from their homes, mainly from rural areas, “and those numbers are rising.” He said keeping farmers in their fields and herders with their flocks is critical to preventing a deepening displacement crisis. If agriculture collapses further, Paulson warned, it will drive up malnutrition, increase displacement and worsen the humanitarian situation. FAO in 2021 has supported nearly 2 million Afghans with livelihood and cash assistance, Paulsen said. He said the $36 million that the FAO needs urgently for the winter farming season was part of the U.N.’s emergency appeal for $606 million. At a conference in Geneva on Monday, donors pledged $1.2 billion — double the amount sought, which Paulsen called encouraging. FAO hopes the pledges will fully fund the $36 million needed, but Paulsen noted that they are only promises for now and donors need to quickly provide the cash.

As the final five U.S. military transport aircraft lifted off out of Afghanistan Monday, they left behind up to 200 Americans and thousands of desperate Afghans who couldn’t get out and now must rely on the Taliban to allow their departure. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. will continue to try to get Americans and Afghans out of the country, and will work with Afghanistan’s neighbors to secure their departure either over land or by charter flight once the Kabul airport reopens. “We have no illusion that any of this will be easy, or rapid,” said Blinken, adding that the total number of Americans who are in Afghanistan and still want to leave may be closer to 100. Read: Taliban guard airport as most NATO troops leave Afghanistan. Speaking shortly after the Pentagon announced the completion of the U.S. military pullout Monday, Blinken said the U.S. Embassy in Kabul will remain shuttered and vacant for the foreseeable future. American diplomats, he said, will be based in Doha, Qatar. “We will continue our relentless efforts to help Americans, foreign nationals and Afghans leave Afghanistan if they choose,” Blinken said in an address from the State Department. “Our commitment to them holds no deadline.” Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told reporters the U.S. military was able to get as many as 1,500 Afghans out in the final hours of the American evacuation mission. But now it will be up to the State Department working with the Taliban to get any more people out. McKenzie said there were no citizens left stranded at the airport and none were on the final few military flights out. He said the U.S. military maintained the ability to get Americans out right up until just before the end, but “none of them made it to the airport.” “There’s a lot of heartbreak associated with this departure,” said McKenzie. “We did not get everybody out that we wanted to get out. But I think if we’d stayed another 10 days we wouldn’t have gotten everybody out that we wanted to get out.” McKenzie and other officials painted a vivid picture of the final hours U.S. troops were on the ground, and the preparations they took to ensure that the Taliban and Islamic State group militants did not get functioning U.S. military weapons systems and other equipment. The terror threat remains a major problem in Afghanistan, with at least 2,000 “hard core” members of the Islamic State group who remain in the country, including many released from prisons as the Taliban swept to control. Underscoring the ongoing security threats, the weapon systems used just hours earlier to counter IS rockets launched toward the airport were kept operational until “the very last minute” as the final U.S. military aircraft flew out, officials said. One of the last things U.S. troops did was to make the so-called C-RAMS (Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar System) inoperable. McKenzie said they “demilitarized” the system so it can never be used again. Officials said troops did not blow up equipment in order to ensure they left the airport workable for future flights, once those begin again. In addition, McKenzie said the U.S. also disabled 27 Humvees and 73 aircraft so they can never be used again. Throughout the day, as the final C-17 transport planes prepared to take off, McKenzie said the U.S. kept “overwhelming U.S. airpower overhead” to deal with potential IS threats. Read: UK starts bringing troops home from Afghanistan Back at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, watched the final 90 minutes of the military departure in real time from an operations center in the basement. According to a U.S. official, they sat in hushed silence as they watched troops make last-minute runway checks, make the key defense systems inoperable and climb aboard the C-17s. The official said you could hear a pin drop as the last aircraft lifted off, and leaders around the room breathed sighs of relief. Later, Austin phoned Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who was coordinating the evacuation. Donahue and acting U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ross Wilson were the last to board the final plane that left Kabul. Officials spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details of military operations. “Simply because we have left, that doesn’t mean the opportunities for both Americans that are in Afghanistan that want to leave and Afghans who want to leave, they will not be denied that opportunity,” said McKenzie. The military left some equipment for the Taliban in order to run the airport, including two firetrucks, some front-end loaders and aircraft staircases. Blinken said the U.S. will work with Turkey and Qatar to help them get the Kabul airport up and running again. “This would enable a small number of daily charter flights, which is a key for anyone who wants to depart from Afghanistan moving forward,” he said.

The United States completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan late Monday, ending America’s longest war and closing a chapter in military history likely to be remembered for colossal failures, unfulfilled promises and a frantic final exit that cost the lives of more than 180 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members, some barely older than the war. Hours ahead of President Joe Biden’s Tuesday deadline for shutting down a final airlift, and thus ending the U.S. war, Air Force transport planes carried a remaining contingent of troops from Kabul airport. Thousands of troops had spent a harrowing two weeks protecting the airlift of tens of thousands of Afghans, Americans and others seeking to escape a country once again ruled by Taliban militants. In announcing the completion of the evacuation and war effort. Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said the last planes took off from Kabul airport at 3:29 p.m. Washington time, or one minute before midnight in Kabul. He said a number of American citizens, likely numbering in “the very low hundreds,” were left behind, and that he believes they will still be able to leave the country. Read: Taliban guard airport as most NATO troops leave Afghanistan Secretary of State Antony Blinken put the number of Americans left behind at under 200, “likely closer to 100,” and said the State Department would keep working to get them out. He praised the military-led evacuation as heroic and historic and said the U.S. diplomatic presence would shift to Doha, Qatar. Biden said military commanders unanimously favored ending the airlift, not extending it. He said he asked Blinken to coordinate with international partners in holding the Taliban to their promise of safe passage for Americans and others who want to leave in the days ahead. The airport had become a U.S.-controlled island, a last stand in a 20-year war that claimed more than 2,400 American lives. The closing hours of the evacuation were marked by extraordinary drama. American troops faced the daunting task of getting final evacuees onto planes while also getting themselves and some of their equipment out, even as they monitored repeated threats — and at least two actual attacks — by the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate. A suicide bombing on Aug. 26 killed 13 American service members and some 169 Afghans. The final pullout fulfilled Biden’s pledge to end what he called a “forever war” that began in response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and rural Pennsylvania. His decision, announced in April, reflected a national weariness of the Afghanistan conflict. Now he faces criticism at home and abroad, not so much for ending the war as for his handling of a final evacuation that unfolded in chaos and raised doubts about U.S. credibility. The U.S. war effort at times seemed to grind on with no endgame in mind, little hope for victory and minimal care by Congress for the way tens of billions of dollars were spent for two decades. The human cost piled up — tens of thousands of Americans injured in addition to the dead. More than 1,100 troops from coalition countries and more than 100,000 Afghan forces and civilians died, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. In Biden’s view the war could have ended 10 years ago with the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaida extremist network planned and executed the 9/11 plot from an Afghanistan sanctuary. Al-Qaida has been vastly diminished, preventing it thus far from again attacking the United States. Congressional committees, whose interest in the war waned over the years, are expected to hold public hearings on what went wrong in the final months of the U.S. withdrawal. Why, for example, did the administration not begin earlier the evacuation of American citizens as well as Afghans who had helped the U.S. war effort and felt vulnerable to retribution by the Taliban? Read: UK starts bringing troops home from Afghanistan It was not supposed to end this way. The administration’s plan, after declaring its intention to withdraw all combat troops, was to keep the U.S. Embassy in Kabul open, protected by a force of about 650 U.S. troops, including a contingent that would secure the airport along with partner countries. Washington planned to give the now-defunct Afghan government billions more to prop up its army. Biden now faces doubts about his plan to prevent al-Qaida from regenerating in Afghanistan and of suppressing threats posed by other extremist groups such as the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate. The Taliban are enemies of the Islamic State group but retain links to a diminished al-Qaida. The final U.S. exit included the withdrawal of its diplomats, although the State Department has left open the possibility of resuming some level of diplomacy with the Taliban depending on how they conduct themselves in establishing a government and adhering to international pleas for the protection of human rights. The speed with which the Taliban captured Kabul on Aug. 15 caught the Biden administration by surprise. It forced the U.S. to empty its embassy and frantically accelerate an evacuation effort that featured an extraordinary airlift executed mainly by the U.S. Air Force, with American ground forces protecting the airfield. The airlift began in such chaos that a number of Afghans died on the airfield, including at least one who attempted to cling to the airframe of a C-17 transport plane as it sped down the runway. By the evacuation’s conclusion, well over 100,000 people, mostly Afghans, had been flown to safety. The dangers of carrying out such a mission came into tragic focus last week when the suicide bomber struck outside an airport gate. Speaking shortly after that attack, Biden stuck to his view that ending the war was the right move. He said it was past time for the United States to focus on threats emanating from elsewhere in the world. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “it was time to end a 20-year war.” Read: Afghanistan after US pullout: Qatar emerges as key player The war’s start was an echo of a promise President George W. Bush made while standing atop of the rubble in New York City three days after hijacked airliners slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” he declared through a bullhorn. Less than a month later, on Oct. 7, Bush launched the war. The Taliban’s forces were overwhelmed and Kabul fell in a matter of weeks. A U.S.-installed government led by Hamid Karzai took over and bin Laden and his al-Qaida cohort escaped across the border into Pakistan. The initial plan was to extinguish bin Laden’s al-Qaida, which had used Afghanistan as a staging base for its attack on the United States. The grander ambition was to fight a “Global War on Terrorism” based on the belief that military force could somehow defeat Islamic extremism. Afghanistan was but the first round of that fight. Bush chose to make Iraq the next, invading in 2003 and getting mired in an even deadlier conflict that made Afghanistan a secondary priority until Barack Obama assumed the White House in 2009 and later that year decided to escalate in Afghanistan. Obama pushed U.S. troop levels to 100,000, but the war dragged on though bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in 2011. When Donald Trump entered the White House in 2017 he wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan but was persuaded not only to stay but to add several thousand U.S. troops and escalate attacks on the Taliban. Two years later his administration was looking for a deal with the Taliban, and in February 2020 the two sides signed an agreement that called for a complete U.S. withdrawal by May 2021. In exchange, the Taliban made a number of promises including a pledge not to attack U.S. troops. Biden weighed advice from members of his national security team who argued for retaining the 2,500 troops who were in Afghanistan by the time he took office in January. But in mid-April he announced his decision to fully withdraw. The Taliban pushed an offensive that by early August toppled key cities, including provincial capitals. The Afghan army largely collapsed, sometimes surrendering rather than taking a final stand, and shortly after President Ashraf Ghani fled the capital, the Taliban rolled into Kabul and assumed control on Aug. 15. Some parts of the country modernized during the U.S. war years, and life for many Afghans, especially women and girls, improved measurably. But Afghanistan remains a tragedy, poor, unstable and with many of its people fearing a return to the brutality the country endured when the Taliban ruled from 1996 to 2001. The U.S. failures were numerous. It degraded but never defeated the Taliban and ultimately failed to build an Afghan military that could hold off the insurgents, despite $83 billion in U.S. spending to train and equip the army.

The lightning-fast changes in Afghanistan are forcing the Biden administration to confront the prospect of a resurgent al-Qaida, the group that attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001, at the same time the U.S. is trying to stanch violent extremism at home and cyberattacks from Russia and China. With the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces and rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, “I think al-Qaida has an opportunity, and they’re going to take advantage of that opportunity,” says Chris Costa, who was senior director for counterterrorism in the Trump administration. “This is a galvanizing event for jihadists everywhere.” Read: What Taliban's return means for Bangladesh Al-Qaida’s ranks have been significantly diminished by 20 years of war in Afghanistan, and it’s far from clear that the group has the capacity in the near future to carry out catastrophic attacks on America such as the 9/11 strikes, especially given how the U.S. has fortified itself in the past two decades with surveillance and other protective measures. But a June report from the U.N. Security Council said the group’s senior leadership remains present inside Afghanistan, along with hundreds of armed operatives. It noted that the Taliban, who sheltered al-Qaida fighters before the Sept. 11 attacks, “remain close, based on friendship, a history of shared struggle, ideological sympathy and intermarriage.” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby acknowledged Friday that al-Qaida remains a presence in Afghanistan, though quantifying it is hard because of a reduced intelligence-gathering capability in the country and “because it’s not like they carry identification cards and register somewhere.” Even inside the country, al-Qaida and the Taliban represent only two of the urgent terrorism concerns, as evidenced by unease about the potential for Islamic State attacks against Americans in Afghanistan that over the weekend forced the U.S. military to develop new ways to get evacuees to the airport in Kabul. The Taliban and IS have fought each other in the past, but the worry now is that Afghanistan could again be a safe harbor for multiple extremists determined to attack the U.S. or other countries. President Joe Biden has spoken repeatedly of what he calls an “over-the-horizon capability” that he says will enable the U.S. to keep track of terrorism threats from afar. His national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told reporters Monday that Biden has been clear that counterterrorism capabilities have evolved to the point where the threat can be suppressed without a strong boots-on-the-ground presence. He said the intelligence community does not believe al-Qaida currently has the capability to attack the U.S. Read: Who are the Taliban? The U.S. is also presumably anticipating that strengthened airport screening and more sophisticated surveillance can be more effective than 20 years ago in thwarting an attack. But experts worry that intelligence-gathering capabilities needed as an early-warning system against an attack will be negatively affected by the troop withdrawal. An added complication is the sheer volume of pressing national security threats that dwarf what the U.S. government was confronting before the Sept. 11 attacks. These include sophisticated cyber operations from China and Russia that can cripple critical infrastructure or pilfer sensitive secrets, nuclear ambitions in Iran and an ascendant domestic terrorism threat laid bare by the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. FBI Director Chris Wray has described that home-grown threat as “metastasizing,” with the number of arrests of white supremacists and racially motivated extremists nearly tripling since his first year on the job. “My concern is that you can’t compare 2001 to today,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. There’s a “much vaster and better organized bureaucracy,” he said, but it’s burdened with demands not specifically tied to terrorism. Hoffman said that although he didn’t think al-Qaida would be able to quickly use Afghanistan as a launchpad for attacks against the U.S., it may re-establish “its coordinating function” in the region to work with and encourage strikes by its affiliates — a patient strategy that may yet be vindicated. “Terrorist groups don’t conform to train timetables or flight schedules,” Hoffman said. “They do things when it suits them and, as al-Qaida was doing, they quietly lay the foundation in hopes that that foundation will eventually affect or determine their success.” The concern is resonant enough that Biden administration officials told Congress last week that, based on the evolving situation, they now believe terror groups like al-Qaida may be able to grow much faster than expected. In June, the Pentagon’s top leaders said an extremist group like al-Qaida may be able to regenerate in Afghanistan and pose a threat to the U.S. homeland within two years of the American military’s withdrawal. The Sept. 11 attacks made al-Qaida the most internationally recognizable terror group, but in the past decade at least, the most potent threat inside the U.S. has come from individuals inspired by the Islamic State, resulting in deadly massacres like the ones in San Bernardino, California, and Orlando. But al-Qaida hardly disappeared. U.S. authorities alleged last year that a Saudi gunman who killed three U.S. sailors at a military base in Florida in 2019 had communicated with al-Qaida operatives about planning and tactics. Last December, the Justice Department charged a Kenyan man with trying to stage a 9/11-style attack on the U.S. on behalf of the terrorist organization al-Shabab, which is linked to al-Qaida. Now it’s possible that other extremists will find themselves inspired by al-Qaida, even if not directed by it. “Until recently, I would have said that the threat from al-Qaida core is pretty modest. They didn’t have safe haven in Afghanistan, their senior leadership was scattered,” said Nathan Sales, former coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department. But, now with the Taliban back in control, “all of that could change and could change very rapidly.”

Reports of targeted killings in areas overrun by the Taliban mounted Friday, fueling fears that they will return Afghanistan to the repressive rule they imposed when they were last in power, even as they urged imams to push a message of unity at Friday’s prayers. Terrified that the new de facto rulers would commit such abuses and despairing for their country’s future, thousands have raced to Kabul’s airport and border crossings following the Taliban’s stunning blitz through Afghanistan. Others have taken to the streets to protest the takeover — acts of defiance that Taliban fighters have violently suppressed. The Taliban say they have become more moderate since they last ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s and have pledged to restore security and forgive those who fought them in the 20 years since a U.S.-led invasion. Ahead of Friday prayers, leaders urged imams to use sermons to appeal for unity and urge people not to flee the country. Read: Afghans protest Taliban in emerging challenge to their rule But many Afghans are skeptical, fearing that the Taliban will erase the gains, especially for women, achieved in the past two decades. An Amnesty International report provided more evidence Friday that undercut the Taliban’s claims they have changed. The rights group said that its researchers spoke to eyewitnesses in Ghazni province who recounted how the Taliban killed nine ethnic Hazara men in the village of Mundarakht on July 4-6. It said six of the men were shot, and three were tortured to death. Hazaras are Shiite Muslims who were previously persecuted by the Taliban and who made major gains in education and social status in recent years. The brutality of the killings was “a reminder of the Taliban’s past record, and a horrifying indicator of what Taliban rule may bring,” said Agnes Callamard, the head of Amnesty International. The rights group warned that many more killings may have gone unreported because the Taliban cut cellphone services in many areas they’ve captured to prevent images from being published. Separately, Reporters without Borders expressed alarm at the news that Taliban fighters killed the family member of an Afghan journalist working for German’s Deutsche Welle on Wednesday. The broadcaster said fighters conducted house-to-house searches for their reporter, who had already relocated to Germany. It said the Taliban also raided the homes of at least three of its journalists. “Sadly, this confirms our worst fears,” said Katja Gloger of Reporters without Borders’ German section. “The brutal action of the Taliban show that the lives of independent media workers in Afghanistan are in acute danger.” Meanwhile, a Norway-based private intelligence group that provides information to the U.N. said it obtained evidence that the Taliban have rounded up Afghans on a blacklist of people they believe worked in key roles with the previous Afghan administration or with U.S.-led forces. In an email, the executive director of RHIPTO Norwegian Center for Global Analyses said the organization knew about several threat letters sent to Afghans, including a man who was taken from his Kabul apartment this week by the Taliban. “We had access to hard copies of concrete letters issued and stamped by the Taliban Military Commission to this effect,” said Christian Nellemann. A report from the group that was obtained by The Associated Press included a copy of one of the letters. Read: At least 1 die as Taliban violently disperse rare protest The AP could not independently verify the claims made by the group. Under the Taliban’s previous rule, women were largely confined to their homes, television and music were banned, and public executions were held regularly. But leaders of the movement have pledged more moderation this time. It’s not clear whether the reports of abuses indicate that Taliban leaders are saying one thing but doing another or whether they simply don’t have full control over their forces. The scale and speed of their takeover seems to have challenged the leadership’s ability to control their fighters. In Kabul, for instance, there have been reports of fighters promising security to major news outlets, but also examples of them intimidating business owners. Amid the uncertainty, thousands have tried to flee the country, braving checkpoints manned by Taliban fighters to rush to Kabul’s airport, where a chaotic evacuation is underway. Mohammad Naim, who has been among the crowd at the airport for four days trying to escape, said he had to put his children on the roof of a car on the first day to save them from being crushed by the mass of people. He saw other children killed who were unable to get out of the way. Naim, who said he had been an interpreter for U.S. forces, urged others not to the come to airport. “It is a very, very crazy situation right now,” he said. The United States is struggling to pick up the pace of evacuations it is running from Afghanistan, where thousands of Americans and their Afghan allies may be in need of escape. European countries are also working to bring their citizens and those who have worked with them out. But Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles said Friday that its military transport planes are leaving Kabul partly empty in the tumult. “Nobody’s in control of the situation,” Robles told Spanish public radio RNE. Getting to the facility is also a major challenge. Germany was sending two helicopters to Kabul to help bring small numbers of people from elsewhere in the city to the airport, officials said. As concerns mount about what a Taliban government will look like, the group’s leaders are meeting with some officials from previous Afghan administrations. An Afghan official familiar with those talks indicated nothing would come of them before the last U.S. troops leave, currently planned for Aug. 31. The Taliban’s lead negotiator, Anas Haqqani, has said the group agreed with the U.S. to “do nothing” until after that date, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give information to the media. The Taliban have said they want an inclusive government, but, as with their other promises, it was not clear if they would make good on that. In addition to concerns about Taliban abuses, officials have warned that Afghanistan’s already weakened economy could crumble further without the massive international aid that sustained the toppled Western-backed government. The U.N. said there were dire food shortages and experts said the country was severely in need of cash.

A Taliban official has announced a general “amnesty” for all in Afghanistan and urged women to join its government. Enamullah Samangani, member of Islamic Emirate’s cultural commission, made the comments Tuesday on Afghan state television, which the militants now control. “The Islamic Emirate don’t want women to be victims,” he said, using the militants’ term for Afghanistan. Read:Taliban sweep into Afghan capital after government collapses He added: “The structure of government is not fully clear, but based on experience, there should be a fully Islamic leadership and all sides should join.” Meanwhile calm returned to Kabul’s international airport Tuesday after a chaotic day saw hundreds of Afghans fleeing the Taliban rush the runway and hang off a U.S. Air Force flight, with several plunging to the deaths in chaos that killed at least seven people. Read: Who are the Taliban? The crowds came Monday while the Taliban enforced their rule over the capital of 5 million people after a lightning advance across the country that took just over a week to dethrone the country’s Western-backed government. There were no major reports of abuses or fighting, but many residents stayed home and remained fearful after the insurgents’ takeover saw prisons emptied and armories looted.

Four presidents share responsibility for the missteps in Afghanistan that accumulated over two decades. But only President Joe Biden will be the face of the war’s chaotic, violent conclusion. The president fought that reality Monday as he spread blame for the Taliban’s swift and complete recapture of Afghanistan. He pointed to a previous agreement brokered by then-President Donald Trump, expressed frustration with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and lamented the performance of Afghan national security forces. Republicans overwhelmingly criticized Biden and he found few vocal backers among fellow Democrats. Read: Chaos as thousands flee Afghanistan after Taliban takeover The collapse of the Afghan government is the biggest foreign policy crisis of Biden’s young presidency, recalling setbacks for past presidents such as the withdrawal from Vietnam and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. The reverberations of the Taliban’s success were startling, endangering Afghan women and girls, posing new security threats and threatening to undercut global views of America’s reliability. In the face of such stark consequences, Biden admitted no fault for the chaotic drawdown and instead forcefully defended his move to leave a nation the U.S. has tried to safeguard since it toppled the Taliban regime after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when smoke still rose from the rubble of the World Trade Center. “Here’s what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not,” said Biden. “How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war? I will not repeat the mistakes we made in the past.” Read: Biden team surprised by rapid Taliban gains in Afghanistan When Biden took responsibility, it was more for ending the war than for the manner in which it happened. “I know my decision will be criticized. But I would rather take that criticism than pass this on to a fifth president,” said Biden. “I am the president of the United States, the buck stops with me.” His firm tone differed little from just five weeks ago, when he bullishly predicted what would happen as his August 31 deadline for withdrawal neared. He declared there was going to be no repeat of the humiliating U.S. evacuation from Vietnam nearly a half century ago and “no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.” But Monday yielded devastating images from Kabul that rivaled anything witnessed in Saigon. Thousands of Afghan citizens, many of whom worked as translators and other aides to American troops, thronged the Kabul airport, desperate to escape the Taliban. In heartbreaking footage, some tried to desperately board a U.S. military plane flying to safety, attempting to dash alongside as it raced down the runway. A few managed to cling to the plane before it took off and video showed several falling through the air as the airplane rapidly gained altitude over the city. The evacuation received condemnation at home and abroad, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel calling the latest developments “bitter, dramatic and awful.” And security officials warned that Afghanistan would soon provide safe harbor for terrorist groups again. The Taliban seemed poised to have total of control of Afghanistan on Sept. 11, just as they did on the date two decades earlier when al-Qaida terror attacks plotted from its soil toppled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon. The fallout from 2001 attacks reshaped America’s relationship with the Middle East, and more than 3,000 American and NATO forces died in the resulting combat in Afghanistan during the manhunt for Osama bin Laden and beyond. Under the command of President George W. Bush, American forces stormed into Afghanistan soon after the terror attacks on a hunt for bin Laden while trying to disrupt al-Qaida’s ability to conduct further assaults on the West. There was immediate success: The Taliban were routed, the terror group disrupted. But after that came the grinding second phase of the war and a surge of troops from President Barack Obama in 2009. Though Obama later moved to reduce the number of troops, the volume of insurgent attacks and civilian causalities prevented a full drawdown. Trump mulled meeting the Taliban at Camp David on an earlier Sept. 11 anniversary, only to back away from the idea amid an uproar. But he announced that the U.S. would pull all its forces out by May 2021, an agreement Biden honored and delayed only slightly. Efforts were made, at great expense, across all the administrations to train and arm the Afghan forces once the U.S. departed. But that investment of American blood, time and treasure proved useless as the Taliban conquered much of the nation without a fight and Afghanistan’s president fled the country as soon as the invading forces reached Kabul. Read: Who are the Taliban?  In the upper ranks of Biden’s staff, the rapid collapse in Afghanistan only confirmed the decision to leave: If the meltdown of the Afghan forces would come so quickly after nearly two decades of American presence, another six months or a year or two or more would not have changed anything. His move to withdraw troops this summer, though polarizing in the national security community, had been praised by some on both sides of the aisle as timely and appropriate. But on Monday, Republicans were eager to slam Biden’s decision and blame him for the chaos, though many of them had supported a withdrawal when it had been proposed by Trump a year ago. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, however, had consistently advocated keeping troops in Afghanistan, and he said the military briefings he attended suggested the Taliban would be able to quickly regain power. “I think the president felt strongly about this, obviously,” McConnell said. “He overruled his own military leaders to do it and he owns it.” Biden has argued for more than a decade that Afghanistan was a kind of purgatory for the United States. He found it to be corrupt, addicted to America’s largesse and an unreliable partner that should be made to fend for itself. His goal was to protect Americans from terrorist attacks, not building a country, and his aides have pointed to polling — taken before the chaos of the last week — that shows that a majority of Americans favor bringing troops home. But that political gamble could prove risky as the scenes of fear and violence from Afghanistan are broadcast around the globe, especially if the chaos in Kabul makes “Saigon look like Disney World,” warned Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., a veteran who served in Afghanistan. “The bottom line is that there’s going to be a lot of people that are very let down by the United States of America,” Kinzinger said in an interview. “We will inevitably, inevitably be in conflict again somewhere. How are we going to convince those locals that we’re going to follow through when we’ve abandoned those in Afghanistan?”