Afghanistan Peace Campaign17 August 2026
Steve Coll, our senior editor, asks what the anniversary means in Kabul and Washington
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In Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, August 15th is “Victory Day”, a national holiday. It commemorates the date five years ago when the former president, Ashraf Ghani, fled Kabul in an Mi-17 helicopter, sealing the collapse of the Islamic Republic, the democracy built up by America and NATO after 9/11. During this year’s celebrations, pick-up trucks packed with Talibs waving white and black flags paraded near the shuttered American embassy. Sirajuddin Haqqani, the interior minister, delivered a video address, attributing the Taliban’s triumph to “divine assistance” and “moral courage”, while acknowledging that “issues and problems…may still exist”.
How a government marks a war anniversary suggests something about the past’s meaning in the present. The Taliban’s defeat of America and the peace that has followed provide the movement’s main claims to domestic legitimacy. Loudly celebrating victory over foreign apostates each August reprises the Taliban’s story of itself. It also offers a distraction at a time when daily life in Afghanistan is bleak and getting worse, as my colleague Tom Sasse describes in his brilliant reportage from a recent 1,000-km drive across the country.
Mr Haqqani leads a powerful network of Taliban in eastern Afghanistan and presides over national police forces through his ministry. He is perceived to be restive about the hardline policies of the movement’s emir, Haibatullah Akhundzada, a cleric who resides in Kandahar. Mr Akhundzada is singularly responsible for the Taliban’s ban on education for girls and women after age 12, a policy that has made it all but impossible for the Taliban to persuade America or European governments to unwind sanctions or repatriate frozen assets from abroad. Yet Mr Akhundzada’s grip on power has only tightened during the past five years, and while there clearly is grumbling about his obscurantism within the Taliban’s ranks, the emir has thus far marginalised and contained dissenters.
In America, the Afghan war remains undigested and contentious. Sean Parnell, the public-affairs man for Pete Hegseth, secretary of war, looks set to release a new “accountability” report this month, tied to the five-year anniversary of the evacuation. A former US Army captain who served with valour in Afghanistan, Mr Parnell is a Trump-aligned partisan, but he has suggested he will publish classified documents from 2021 that could provide fresh insight into what went wrong in the lead-up to August.
The report may also impugn or even seek to discipline some of the generals and admirals who oversaw the withdrawal while serving under Joe Biden. Mr Hegseth, a retired major with a chip on his shoulder, has censured, forcibly retired or passed over a number of general and flag officers, usually in the name of battling wokeness, but occasionally to advance Donald Trump’s retribution campaign against former officers who have criticised him. Among them is Mark Milley, a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the target of a Hegseth-instigated investigation. Mr Milley was chairman during the Afghanistan retrograde. It would be a shame—but hardly a surprise—if Mr Parnell’s panel piles on.
America’s failure in Afghanistan unfolded across two decades, shaped by four American presidents and the decisions of countless diplomats, spies and military commanders. The actions of the generals and admirals called to duty at the dismal end deserve scrutiny, but scapegoating will only ensure that many more anniversaries must pass before an honest national reckoning with defeat is possible.
Do you have any questions about life in Afghanistan—or what the country’s future might be like? Please send them to thewarroom@economist.com. For more on this topic, I’d encourage you to watch the latest episode of The Insider. A panel of editors discuss whether it’s time to engage with the Taliban—despite the regime’s repression. And if you’re looking for reporting on defence and international security from elsewhere, you will find more stories below.■