America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan began only weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks and lasted just short of 20 years, ending in the chaos of Aug. 15, 2021, when the capital, Kabul, fell once again to the Taliban.
Journalists for The New York Times covered the war from beginning to end and have continued capturing the lives of Afghanistan’s people as they navigate a scarred landscape and an uncertain future.
2001-2002
The War Begins
Operation Enduring Freedom began on Oct. 7, 2001, with an American bombing campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. American Special Operations forces teams linked up with Afghan militias opposed to the Taliban, mainly the Northern Alliance, to drive the Taliban from power. Kabul fell in mid-November, along with the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.
In December, Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda’s leader, escaped to Pakistan through the mountains around Tora Bora. That same month, an interim Afghan government led by Hamid Karzai was installed.
Northern Alliance troops firing on Taliban positions in rugged territory outside the northeastern city of Taloqan in October 2001.
Fighters for the Northern Alliance heading to the front lines near the besieged Taliban stronghold of Kunduz in November 2001.
On their way into Kabul in November 2001, Northern Alliance members found a Taliban fighter in a ditch and killed him, despite his pleas.
An American B-52 bomber circling above Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan in December 2001.
Fighters for the Eastern Alliance, another anti-Taliban militia, running for cover from Al Qaeda sniper fire in the Tora Bora mountains in December 2001.
2003-2007
Drift to Iraq
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced an end to major combat operations in Afghanistan in May 2003. Even with a major reconstruction effort underway there, and about 8,000 American troops in place, President George W. Bush’s administration began shifting combat resources to the war in Iraq.
[Read a Times historical photo essay on past Afghan wars, The Empire Stopper.]
The Taliban-led insurgency grew stronger in 2006, carrying out more ambushes and suicide bombings. Despite training and equipment supplied by the United States and allied forces, Afghan security forces could not contain the Taliban resurgence, which was aided by militants across the border in Pakistan.
By 2007, the number of American troops in Afghanistan had climbed to 25,000.
American soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division yelling to others to get out of the line of fire after being ambushed by Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan in June 2006.
Women in Kabul waiting to vote in October 2004. Afghanistan’s landmark presidential election quickly fell into dispute.
Mohammad Akbar holding the hand of his nephew, Mohammad, age 3, at a hospital in Kandahar in May 2006. The boy was injured in an attack by U.S. forces and suffered burn injuries.
British soldiers of the Royal Anglians B Company, part of NATO forces, firing toward Taliban positions after coming under attack during a patrol in Kajaki in July 2007.
Wounded soldiers in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan in October 2007.
Afghan National Army soldiers detained a man whom they believed to be a Taliban fighter during the search of a village in southern Afghanistan in May 2006.
2008-2010
In December, Mr. Obama announced a “surge” meant to build and train an Afghan security force that would be strong enough to assume responsibility for fighting the Taliban insurgency. His plan included sending 30,000 more American troops, bringing the total number to nearly 100,000 by mid-2010.
An Army patrol worked its way through the Korengal Valley in April 2009 to meet with a group of village elders. An I.E.D. exploded. Then the Taliban attacked. Soldiers scrambled. One died.
A German soldier burning a flare at a campsite in the desert of Kunduz Province, in October 2009.
A suicide bomber struck near a hotel in Kabul in December 2009, killing at least eight people and wounding dozens.
A bullet-pierced window at a Kabul guesthouse attacked by the Taliban in November 2009. Five United Nations workers were killed.
Marines came under attack in Marja, in Helmand Province, in February 2010 while on their way to check a building that had been bombed earlier in the day. Most of the Marines were experiencing combat for the first time.
Village elders meeting in Marja in March 2010.
Afghan soldiers rushing a wounded police officer to an American helicopter in Kunar Province in March 2010.
American soldiers on a transport plane about to land in Mazar-i-Sharif in April 2010.
An Afghan man who was detained on suspicion of being involved in an attack by militants on the first day of a national peace council meeting in Kabul in June 2010.
Members of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry, tending to a wounded comrade in Kunduz in September 2010.
2011-2013
A Troop Drawdown
In May 2011, a U.S. Navy SEAL team killed Osama bin Laden in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he had been living for years. In June, Mr. Obama announced that he would pull 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by mid-2012.
In 2012, Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, began blaming United States and coalition troops for rising civilian casualties. His relationship with American leaders deteriorated.
Afghans took over most security responsibilities in 2013, with the U.S.-led coalition’s forces shifting to training and counterterrorism operations.
Soldiers boarding a transport helicopter in Kunduz in March 2011.
The mother of Khan Mohammad, a 3-month-old baby who died from exposure to the cold, being comforted before her child was washed and buried in the Nasaji Bagrami Camp for displaced persons in Kabul in February 2012.
Afghan soldiers, left, and American soldiers blew up a Taliban firing position in the village of Layadira, in Kandahar Province, in February 2013.
Members of the 101st Airborne Division in Paktia Province in April 2013.
Samiullah, 8 months old and malnourished, being held by his mother, Islam Bibi, 15, at a hospital in Lashkar Gah, in Helmand Province, in September 2013.
Sayed Wazir, 40, a former mujahedeen, firing a rocket toward Taliban positions in Wardak Province in November 2013.
The view from a Humvee of Highway 1, which links Kabul with Afghanistan’s other major cities, in November 2013.
2014-2018
A Taliban Resurgence
On Dec. 31, 2014, the combat mission in Afghanistan formally ended, but the American military presence in the country did not. Mr. Obama announced a timetable for the withdrawal of most troops by the end of 2016.
After a 2014 election marred by fraud, Ashraf Ghani became president, but signed a power-sharing agreement with his top opponent, Abdullah Abdullah.
On the battlefield, the Afghan security forces increasingly struggled against the Taliban, taking heavy casualties and losing territory.
In August 2017, President Trump, early in his first term in office, said he would continue to prosecute the war.
An Afghan police officer, Mohammad Qassim, 28, recovering at a hospital run by Emergency, an Italian nonprofit group, after losing his right leg to a Taliban explosive in Marja, Helmand Province.
The aftermath of a U.S. airstrike that hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz in October 2015. Forty-two people were killed in the attack.
The bodies of 20 commandos lined up in November 2018 outside the governor’s office in Sang-e-Masha, in Ghazni Province. Their company was almost destroyed fighting the Taliban.
A view of the outskirts of Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province in March 2016.
A Deal With the Taliban
In late 2018, American and Taliban negotiators began holding peace talks in Doha, Qatar. The Afghan government was excluded from the talks; the Taliban refused to meet with its officials.
On Feb. 29, 2020, the United States signed a peace deal with the Taliban, opening the door to a gradual, final troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and the beginning of direct talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban to determine the country’s future.
About 12,000 American troops were still in the country.
A funeral for one of 63 people killed at a wedding in Kabul by an Islamic State suicide bomber in August 2019.
A crater left by a car-bomb attack in Kabul in September 2019. The Taliban claimed responsibility.
Afghan police officers inspecting a replacement trench after their base was overrun by the Taliban in February 2020.
Two children passing members of a Taliban Red Unit, an elite force, in the Alingar district of Laghman in March 2020.
2021-2026
The Taliban’s Return
On April 14, 2021, the recently sworn-in U.S. president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., called for a complete withdrawal of all American forces from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021.
The United States had spent about $2 trillion on the war effort. About 2,400 American troops and nearly 700 troops from other nations in the coalition died. More than 40,000 civilians were killed, as well as an estimated 60,000 Afghan security forces.
After the rushed withdrawal of U.S. forces, the Afghan government did not mount a significant resistance, and Taliban forces quickly regained control. Many Afghans feared a return to civil war between the Taliban and the remaining anti-Taliban fighters, but the violence affecting civilians dropped sharply with the end of the U.S. war.
In 2022, the Taliban government imposed a series of edicts governing every aspect of daily life, which remain in place. The rules are particularly strict for women and girls, who are no longer allowed to work at most jobs or seek formal education beyond sixth grade.
Military conflict has not disappeared. In late 2025, Pakistan began a campaign against the armed groups operating on its border with Afghanistan, while the Taliban tighten their grip on Afghan society and defend their rule against the few remaining forces of resistance.
An American soldier aboard a Chinook helicopter as U.S. troops began their withdrawal from the country, loading up ammunition and supplies from Kandahar Airfield in May 2021.
A passenger in a car awaiting clearance at a security checkpoint in Herat in July 2021. The Taliban would soon seize Herat, the country’s third-largest city.
On the day that Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, fell to the Taliban, the group’s fighters rode a Humvee near a roundabout in the city on Aug. 15, 2021. The date is now celebrated in Afghanistan as the moment of the country’s liberation from U.S. occupation.
With the U.S. withdrawal deadline looming, mayhem persisted outside the Kabul airport as American Marines stood guard in August 2021. Even some Afghans holding special immigrant visas were turned away to give priority to U.S. citizens.
In August 2021, during the last days of the U.S. evacuation, there was another spasm of violence, when a suicide bomb exploded outside the gates of the crowded airport in Kabul. An Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed 13 U.S. service members and scores of civilians.
Before the city fell, Khalil Haqqani appeared at a mosque in Kabul to help establish Taliban authority. When the Taliban declared an interim government, they appointed many loyalists from their rule in the 1990s, including Mr. Haqqani.
Relatives and neighbors at the site of a U.S. drone strike that killed 10 civilians in Kabul in August 2021.
Children flying homemade kites on a hillside graveyard in Kabul in December 2021. The first Taliban government had banned kite flying, and Afghans feared that the pastime and other activities would be outlawed again.
A math class in a secret classroom in Afghanistan in May 2026. The Taliban banned formal education beyond sixth grade for girls.
Afghan women and children who had just arrived from Pakistan waiting to be registered as returnees at the Torkham border crossing in Nangarhar Province in October 2023. Seven families paid to travel with their belongings from Pakistan.
Nasiba Ameni, 30, holding her son Abdul Hamad, 1, at a malnutrition ward in Olqan Hospital, in Daykundi Province, in December 2025. Abdul has a heart disease, and his recovery is complicated by severe malnutrition.
Visiting the remains of a house in August 2026 that was damaged during Pakistani airstrikes two months earlier in the village of Mandakhel, in Paktia Province.
Afghan women in the village of Deh-e Kuchay, in Kandahar Province, in May 2025.
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