Afghanistan

Afghanistan is a landlocked country of roughly 43 million people in Central Asia, bordered by Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and China. The Taliban seized Kabul on 15 August 2021, ending a 20-year NATO-backed government that had been established after the US invasion in October 2001. The takeover triggered the collapse of Afghanistan's internationally recognised security forces, a chaotic evacuation of Western nationals and at-risk Afghans, and the rapid unwinding of two decades of institution-building. No government currently recognises the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government, and the country's seat at the UN is disputed.

Afghanistan has been in near-continuous conflict since the 1979 Soviet invasion, an occupation that ended in 1989 after a decade of mujahideen resistance partly backed by the United States. A civil war followed, and the Taliban first took power from 1996 to 2001. The US-led campaign after the 11 September 2001 attacks removed the Taliban but did not produce a stable successor state. The 2021 withdrawal is now the most cited precedent in Western debates over open-ended military commitments: initial success, protracted occupation, and eventual retreat with the pre-intervention power restored. The War Powers Resolution passed in 1973 specifically to prevent another open-ended presidential war of the Vietnam type, and Afghanistan became the next extended test of that constraint.

Afghanistan faces a severe humanitarian emergency. The UN estimates more than 23 million people are food-insecure. The Taliban government bans girls from secondary and higher education and bars women from most public roles, prompting international aid freezes. The country's GDP collapsed by more than a third in 2021-22 and has not recovered. Afghanistan holds strategic relevance on multiple Lowdown topics: as a geographic transit corridor (its 936 km border with Iran was one of the few routes available to stranded Iranians during the 2026 conflict); as the canonical cautionary example of US military campaigns that achieve tactical objectives but fail to produce durable political outcomes; and as one of Russia's longest-running foreign-policy entanglements (the Soviet-Afghan War remains a touchstone in domestic Russian debates about the Ukraine campaign's political sustainability).