The Daily Fuckup

On Sept. 1, 2021, the Afghanistan collapse was still the political story consuming Washington. Joe Biden was the president who oversaw the evacuation, the airport chaos and the final American exit. But the deal that shaped the endgame was signed more than a year earlier, when the Trump administration and the Taliban reached an agreement in Doha on Feb. 29, 2020.

That agreement did not hand the Taliban victory by itself, and it did not mechanically produce the fall of Kabul. It did, however, set a withdrawal timetable, put a date on the U.S. departure and leave the next president with far less room to maneuver. Under the terms of the pact, U.S. forces would leave by May 2021 unless conditions changed, while the Taliban made promises on terrorism and negotiations that never translated into a durable political settlement. The companion joint declaration with Kabul was supposed to keep the Afghan government in the process; in practice, the Afghan state was already being squeezed out of the center of the war’s final phase.

What happened in 2021 was a chain, not a single decision. Biden ended up extending the withdrawal past the original Trump-era deadline, then ordering a full exit by Aug. 31 after announcing in April that U.S. combat troops would leave by Sept. 11. As the summer went on, the Pentagon kept reducing the U.S. footprint. The Taliban kept advancing. Afghan units and political leaders, who had been dependent on American air power, intelligence and logistics for years, crumbled faster than many in Washington expected.

That is why the Doha agreement mattered in the fallout. It did not make the collapse inevitable, but it changed the leverage. Once the United States publicly committed to leaving, the Taliban could wait for the clock to run and press the battlefield advantage while the Afghan government lost confidence around it. Biden then made his own choices about timing and execution, and those choices mattered in the speed and shape of the end.

By Sept. 1, the argument in Washington was no longer about whether the war was ending. It was about who set the conditions for how it ended, and how much of the disaster belonged to the deal struck in 2020, the decisions made in 2021, and the Afghan state that failed to hold itself together when the pressure came.