On 9/11, I lived in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
Our neighborhood in eastern Kabul, Microryan, stood like a forgotten relic—a gray, unremarkable five-story housing complex built during the Soviet invasion.
By 2001, the Taliban controlled roughly 90 percent of Afghanistan, with the remaining areas, primarily in the north, held by the Northern Alliance, a coalition of anti-Taliban forces, particularly in northern regions like the Panjshir Valley. The Northern Alliance was primarily composed of remnants of the Mujahideen factions that had fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. However, after the collapse of the pro-communist regime in April 1992, they unleashed a devastating civil war that lasted from 1992 to 1996.
The civil war had reduced Kabul to ashes. Windows shattered during the fighting were patched with plastic, and the walls of burned apartments remained blackened by fire, riddled with bullet holes – a haunting reminder of the violence that had ravaged the ancient capital city.
In 1996, after the Taliban takeover and the escape of the Mujahideen, Afghanistan slipped from the chaos of civil war, warlord cruelty, and anarchy into the malaise of poverty, isolation, and disease.
Back then, only the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia recognized the Taliban government. This abandonment left us, the Afghan people, sanctioned and almost cut off from the rest of the world while the Taliban authorities were unchecked and unaccountable. Living in Kabul at the time, it felt as if, for the rest of the world, we didn’t exist. We might have starved if not for the daily aid of five loaves of bread from a United Nations relief agency – our sole lifeline during those desperate times.
There were almost no jobs, the Taliban authorities were barely able to pay the monthly wages of government employees, and international aid agencies had limited operations in the country.
Clean drinking water was scarce. Every few days, we lined up at old Soviet-era water pipes that ran in the basements to collect what we perceived as clean water, storing it in pots and barrels to last until the next opportunity.
To keep warm, we placed a small, portable coal-burning oven in the middle of our living room, using it to cook as well. It was tragically common for people to die from coal smoke due to carbon monoxide poisoning. One of our neighbors, for example, put her 4-year-old son to sleep in a room heated by a coal oven. Within a few hours, her cries echoed through the entire building – her son had died. In another heartbreaking incident, an entire family was found dead, victims of the same silent killer. Despite these tragedies, people continued to burn coal – the cheapest available fuel – in their homes, desperate to stay warm in the harsh winters.
Education had become foreign to Afghan girls. Women were barred from working. Hence, families were streaming into neighboring countries, primarily Iran and Pakistan, while those who remained were effectively trapped in a city devastated by poverty, disease, and drought
During their first rule, the Taliban also banned television, music, and all forms of visual arts. But my family had an old, nearly broken Sony ICF-7601 radio, a 1980s model from the Japanese brand that my parents perhaps had bought at a flea market in Kabul.
The radio was held together in the middle by a plastic band to keep it from falling apart. My father would carefully take it out of the cloth case my mother had sewn to protect it from dust, placing it delicately on the edge of our living room table to turn on the BBC Pashto news broadcast. He would listen in a hushed voice, as we didn’t want to attract any unwanted attention to our home.
That radio was our sole connection to the outside world.
My parents would kneel before the radio at around 8:00 p.m. Kabul time, when the broadcast began. Looking back, I would guess it was a half-hour of programming, after which my parents would give us their own analysis of the day’s events. That was the wrap-up of our daily lives. We’d go to bed right after to conserve the oil in the lantern.
It was during this nightly ritual that my family learned of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
My father was away, and it was my mother who followed the routine. That night, she turned off the radio and told us, “Something huge has happened.” We didn’t grasp the full extent of it, but it was clear that my mother was very worried.
My mother’s brief summary – “America has been attacked. Innocent people are killed. Something bad is going to happen” – was a stark reflection of our helplessness.
But we were too weak, too distant, too impoverished to think beyond it. Afghanistan’s name was coming up as the news developed, but it was a relief that none of the attackers or those directly involved were Afghans. “They were all Arabs,” my mother said.
However, Osama Bin Laden – the Saudi orchestrator of the September 11th attacks – and the head of al-Qaida were hiding in Afghanistan, and the United States demanded that the Taliban hand him over. The Taliban leadership refused.
It took us nearly a month to fully understand the impact of that refusal.
On October 7, 2001, as the United States began its military campaign in Afghanistan, then-President George W. Bush addressed the nation. He declared, “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine, and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan.”
Bush framed the invasion as a dual mission: to combat terrorism and to bring freedom to the Afghan people under Taliban rule. The U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan and promised to liberate us, build a democracy, and establish a government in our name.
The coalition soldiers entered Kabul on November 12, 2001, during the initial phase of the military campaign aimed at dismantling al-Qaida and removing the Taliban from power. Our neighbor, an elderly man whom we called Baba, brought flowers to the soldiers. It was perhaps the first time an Afghan elder had welcomed a foreign invader.
Suddenly, we had a newfound freedom. Young men danced in the streets of our neighborhood, and cars blared music with their windows down, letting the sound echo through our somber surroundings. Schools reopened immediately, and all the girls were urged to return to class. Universities resumed as well.
It was as though a new life had been breathed into the hearts and souls of the people. Families who had fled to Pakistan and Iran began returning. Kabul felt as if a great wave had swept through, transforming everything.
We were supposedly rescued, with the Taliban cast as our enemies and the new Afghan government that the West sat up as our saviors.
Unfortunately, our democracy perished from the beginning, when the United States and its allies chose our tormentors to bring us a better life. Most of the figures ushered into the new government were the same people who had inflicted civil war upon the Afghan people just a few years earlier.
These individuals were now being presented as new, polished alternatives – but we saw them as mere repackaged versions of the war criminals and human rights abusers who had once been notorious for atrocities such as skinning people alive, rape, and mass murders. They were now being paraded as champions of human rights. Upon coming to power, their campaign of brutality on the defenseless began right from the start, with systemic rapes, torture and revenge killings rural areas.
We placed our hope in Hamid Karzai, a man with a background in the Jihad against the Soviet invasion but no personal involvement in the civil war or in leading militias or drug dealing. Yet, reality soon dispelled the illusion of a clean slate.
One man could not deliver justice to a nation scarred so deeply, burdened by powerful warlords and an international community that heavily interfered in the internal affairs of the country. Karzai complained, accusing the United States of acting like a “colonial power.”
Over the next two decades, thousands of innocent civilians were slaughtered. The reported figures of 70,000 Afghan military and police deaths, alongside 46,319 civilian casualties estimated by the United States Institute of Peace, begin to illustrate the enormity of the loss. The campaign to win Afghan hearts and minds was harsh. Arrests, imprisonments, night raids, and bombings were so indiscriminate that many Afghan villagers unconnected to the Taliban were caught in the crossfire and alienated. Weddings, funerals, schools, and mosques were bombed.
Official casualty statistics, both military and civilian, only hint at the true scale of the conflict. Slowly but steadily, the air in Kabul changed. The city reeked of explosions, burned rubber, and blood. In a cruel irony, during the bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz by U.S. forces, one of the 42 people killed was the nephew of our neighbor Baba, the man who had welcomed the foreign soldiers with flowers.
The consequences of the war extend beyond immediate human suffering to severe environmental damage. For example, a 2017 study revealed alarming levels of toxic substances in Afghanistan’s water, including arsenic, boron, and fluoride – serious pollutants with grave health implications.
Amid this environmental and humanitarian crisis, it is worth noting that Osama Bin Laden was eventually discovered living in Pakistan, a short drive from its powerful military headquarters.
The U.S. campaign to spread democracy in Afghanistan quickly devolved into the country’s longest war. Approximately 2,459 U.S. military personnel were killed, and 20,769 were wounded during the conflict, which stretched from October 2001 to August 2021.
After a two-decade-long war, the group signed the Doha Agreement with the United States in February 2020 – a document focused primarily on troop withdrawal and the Taliban’s commitment to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a terrorist haven. Once again, the Afghan people were forgotten and the Taliban returned to power.
As per the agreement, the last U.S. soldier was out of Afghanistan on August 30, 2021.
The Taliban claim to be protecting Afghanistan from foreign terrorists, perhaps having learned from past lessons. But on July 31, 2022, al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the United States’ most wanted terrorists, was killed in a drone strike in Kabul. It seems unlikely he could have been living in Afghanistan’s capital without some level of cooperation from those in power. The Taliban also claim to be fighting the Islamic State’s local branch, frequently reporting arrests and ambushes against IS operatives across the country. But cross-border terrorist attacks remain a major concern for Afghanistan’s neighbors.
While the Doha agreement did not explicitly address human rights, particularly women’s rights, it outlined the process for intra-Afghan negotiations aimed at achieving a political settlement. But in reality, the U.S. withdrawal has left Afghanistan in a precarious position – back under Taliban control, with a government that has no formal recognition from the outside world. To those of us who lived in Kabul in 2001, the situation is bleakly familiar.
Moving forward, it is imperative that the United States stands with the Afghan people and supports a negotiated solution, rather than once again placing trust in those who have repeatedly failed Afghans. There should be no more engaging with notorious human rights abusers, warlords, and militia leaders as legitimate actors. Over the past two decades, these people did what they knew best: abused power, siphoned U.S. taxpayer dollars intended for the Afghan people, and eroded law, order, and justice in Afghanistan. As Kabul fell, most of them ran away to luxurious lives abroad, leaving a starving population behind.
Through the years, thousands of Afghans played a crucial role in supporting the U.S. mission during the War on Terror, standing alongside the U.S.-led coalition forces on the front lines. They risked their lives, and countless others paid the ultimate price, believing in the promise of a more stable and secure Afghanistan. Yet, many Afghans now face an uncertain future, feeling abandoned as the world turns away following the U.S. withdrawal. Over 40 million Afghans feel locked in isolation, facing an uncertain future.
In other ways, too, Afghanistan has now reverted to where it stood 23 years ago: Women are stripped of the most basic freedoms, the government remains unrecognized, and millions of girls, like I once was, are being denied education, facing starvation and isolation. Their last hope rests with the international community.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks claimed the lives of thousands of innocent people in the United States. They also left an indelible mark on the history of Afghanistan, reshaping countless lives, including my own. Yet 23 years later, millions of Afghans are once again at a stalemate, caught between uncertainty and isolation.
As I look back on the life I once lived in that small, coal-warmed ground floor apartment in Kabul – where the world slipped in only through the crackling whispers of a broken radio and water trickled weakly from forgotten Soviet pipes – I am struck by the cruel echo of history.
The same fear, hunger, and isolation that shaped my life then, again cast their shadows over the lives of millions of Afghan girls today. We clung to hope then, just as these girls do now, but hope, without action, is a fragile flame – flickering in the darkness, until it’s smothered by despair. The world, especially the United States must not let Afghanistan disappear into that darkness once more.