Last month marked five years since the US withdrew its military forces from Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power. The US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and the resultant war, directly killed more than 176,000 Afghan people, including more than 46,000 civilians. Yet major US media outlets have covered the anniversary by muddying the US’s role in the country’s hardships—writing as though Afghanistan’s history began in August 2021.
A CNN article (8/15/26) by Kara Fox offered an egregious bit of historical revisionism:
In the five years since the chaotic US withdrawal from Kabul and the Taliban’s return to power, Afghanistan has become home to one of the world’s worst human rights and humanitarian emergencies.
Afghanistan hasn’t “become” a human rights and humanitarian emergency “since” the US troop withdrawal. It was a disaster during—and in no small part because of—the US war and occupation.
For instance, in November 2019, towards the end of the US occupation, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimated that approximately 2.44 million Afghan were in an “emergency situation” in terms of food insecurity. The next year, Amnesty International noted that four million Afghans were internally displaced and facing widespread problems of “inadequate housing, food insecurity [and] insufficient access to sanitation.”
Both years, the International Rescue Committee put Afghanistan in its top 10 “crises the world should be watching.” Evidently such conditions don’t meet CNN’s threshold for a “humanitarian emergency.”
In terms of rights, a 2019 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report documented Afghan strike forces that were “recruited, trained, equipped and overseen by the CIA” committing
serious abuses between late 2017 and mid-2019. They are illustrative of a larger pattern of serious laws-of-war violations—some amounting to war crimes—that extends to all provinces in Afghanistan where these paramilitary forces operate with impunity.
In 2020, HRW would go on to criticize the US-installed Afghan government for “fail[ing] to prosecute senior officials responsible for sexual assault, torture and killing civilians.” One can debate what constitutes a human rights “emergency,” but it’s clear that rights violations were a defining feature of the US occupation.
