The war ends: America leaves Afghanistan

Background

President Biden announced on 14 April 2021 that US forces would leave Afghanistan before the twentieth anniversary of the 11 September attacks, completing the withdrawal agreed at Doha¹. Pakistan had urged a negotiated settlement before any withdrawal. In June 2021 Prime Minister Imran Khan told an American interviewer that Pakistan would "absolutely not" allow US bases or operations into Afghanistan from its territory, pointing to the more than 70,000 Pakistanis he said had died as a result of the war³.

What happened

The Afghan government collapsed in a matter of days in August. The Taliban entered Kabul on 15 August, and on 31 August President Biden reported that the last US troops had left¹. During the evacuation Pakistan's embassy in Kabul stayed open, Pakistan International Airlines operated evacuation flights, and Islamabad served as a transit point; Pakistani officials said that by late August they had helped evacuate several thousand foreign nationals, including staff of international organisations². Secretary of State Antony Blinken thanked Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi for Pakistan's support with the evacuation of US citizens and others when they met in September⁴.

The same month, testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on 13 September, Blinken faced bipartisan calls for a harder line on Pakistan. He said Pakistan had constantly hedged its bets about Afghanistan's future, including by harbouring members of the Taliban and the Haqqani network, and that the administration would look at the role Pakistan had played over twenty years and the role Washington wanted it to play in future⁵. Pakistani officials rejected the charge, arguing that they had facilitated the Doha process at Washington's request and that the collapse reflected failures of the Afghan state and its foreign backers.

Why it mattered

The end of the war removed the central organising purpose of the relationship since 2001. Washington no longer needed Pakistani routes or Pakistani help with the Taliban on the same scale, and the Biden administration kept Islamabad at arm's length for much of 2021. For Pakistan the Taliban victory brought not the stable, friendly neighbour it had hoped for but a sharp rise in attacks by the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), whose fighters operated from Afghanistan; militant attacks in Pakistan in 2021 were reported to be more than 50 per cent higher than in the previous year⁶.

Legacy

The withdrawal opened a period in which both governments sought to define the relationship in broader terms - climate, health, trade and investment - while counter-terrorism cooperation was rebuilt around common threats such as ISIS-Khorasan. The Abbey Gate bombing at Kabul airport on 26 August 2021, which killed 13 US service members and many Afghans, would itself become a point of cooperation in 2025, when Pakistan helped capture a suspect.