The lessons of Afghanistan

The end of America’s war in Afghanistan has prompted an enormous amount of finger-pointing and second-guessing among U.S. officials seeking to make sense of how a 20-year campaign to build up a stable Afghan government could be all but erased in a matter of weeks by the Taliban.

U.S. involvement in the country — from the initial choice to invade to the swift withdrawal, and everything in between — will surely be debated for a long time. There are also questions about what the end of the war means for the people of Afghanistan, U.S. interests in the region and the long list of other countries affected by the Taliban’s resumption of power.

The invasion of Afghanistan was the first marker of a new era in America’s relationship with the world that emerged in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, after which the U.S. was much more willing to intervene militarily in the name of global counterterrorism efforts. As the conflict comes to an end, foreign policy experts are debating what lessons the U.S. should take from its longest war and how those lessons should inform leaders’ actions when they’re inevitably confronted with future crises abroad.