The ENTIRE History of the Afghanistan War in 21 Minutes

The ENTIRE History of the Afghanistan War in 21 Minutes The Taliban lost their government in roughly two months in two thousand one. Twenty years later, after more than two trillion dollars in combined American military and development spending, after the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians, after satellite surveillance and precision weapons and the full weight of the most powerful military alliance in history, the Taliban held a victory parade in the same capital city they had been driven from, using captured equipment left behind by the force that had driven them out. The math does not work. The logic does not hold. And yet it happened. How does a government collapse in two months, survive in exile for two decades, and then retake its entire country in eleven days? Why did the most expensive military training program in American history produce an army that dissolved almost overnight? And what does it mean to fight a war where the enemy is not trying to hold territory but simply to outlast you? This is the story of a war that every actor entered with a clear plan, and that no plan survived. A war fought not just on mountains and in valleys but inside assumptions, timelines, and the belief that enough money and enough firepower could substitute for understanding the ground beneath your boots. To see how that war became possible, you have to travel back further than the towers falling in two thousand one. You have to go back to a coup in Kabul in nineteen seventy-eight that almost nobody in the wider world was watching.