The Last Days of the Afghan Republic

A Doomed Evacuation Twenty Years in the Making

Arsalan Noori, Noah Coburn

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2023
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781538178096
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Military Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

It is difficult to overstate the chaos of August 2021 for many of those in Afghanistan, particularly those who had worked closely with the international community there. In a matter of days, U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan and an insurgency threw out a government the international community had spent 20 years and billions of dollars supporting. A government that claimed to stand for women's rights, freedom of the press, education, and a litany of other ideals, was replaced by one that did not allow girls to attend secondary school. The world watched for two weeks as crowds rushed the airport, bodies fell from planes, a suicide bomber killed civilians and soldiers, and a baby was handed to a Marine over a barbed wire wall. The agony of lives so clearly destroyed, as people tried to flee their homeland with little to nothing, felt like images seen in the wake of natural disasters. But this was not a natural disaster. It was completely avoidable.
Part memoir and part history, The Last Days of the Afghan Republic tells this story through the experiences of Arsalan, Fatima, Zeinab, and Najeeb: a scholar, a doctor, a student, and a translator. These young men and women had bought into the promise of the international intervention, that if they studied, worked hard, and believed in democracy and human rights, Afghanistan could become a new country. Their lives also tell the story of Afghanistan over the past thirty years. They recount, from the ground up, the political decisions on the American side that led to the "forever war," the way that Afghan political partners squandered opportunities, and the ways in which the U.S. presence unevenly reshaped Afghan society.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Characters
• Timeline
• Acronyms
• The Last Flight Out of HKIA
• Introduction: The Final Days
• Part I: A Failed Intervention?‌‌‌‌
• Chapter 1 : A Land of Opportunity?
• Chapter 2 : A Contracted War
• Chapter 3 : A Divided Country
• Part II: A Growing Distance
• Chapter 4 : Young Politics
• Chapter 5 : Special Immigrants
• Chapter 6 : Willful Ignorance
• Part III: The Second Coming of the Taliban
• Chapter 7 : Insecurity and Failed Diplomacy
• Chapter 8 : The Challenges of Resettlement
• Chapter 9 : Lawyers, Travel Agents, and Traffickers
• Part IV: The Final Days of the American Occupation
• Chapter 10 : Why Wasn’t It Fixed?
• Chapter 11 : Priority 2‌‌‌
• Chapter 12 : The Collapse
• Part V: After August 15
• Chapter 13 : Chaos‌‌‌
• Chapter 14 : In Afghanistan, It’s Still Who You Know
• Chapter 15 : Unaccompanied Minors
• Chapter 16 : The Women Who Remained Behind
• Part VI: Tea with the Taliban
• Chapter 17 : Airplane Hangars
• Chapter 18 : Making Compromises
• Chapter 19 : Parole‌‌‌
• Chapter 20 : California
• Part VII: Kabul
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography