Americans mark not only the nation’s semi-quincentennial in 2026, but two darker anniversaries: 25 years since the September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks and five years since the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul and the Taliban’s return to power.
Washington has not absorbed either episode into its strategic consciousness. Controversies surrounding 9/11 commemorations and recriminations over who lost Afghanistan reveal a nation that remembers catastrophic events without truly reckoning with them.
From an Afghan perspective, one explanation for this drift stands out: The United States still possesses no settled, coherent understanding of the Taliban.
Controversies surrounding 9/11 commemorations and recriminations over who lost Afghanistan reveal a nation that remembers catastrophic events without truly reckoning with them.
The Taliban occupies a strangely fluid space in the American mind. Over 25 years, the U.S. government has alternately classified it as a terrorist group, an insurgency, a legitimate political actor, a diplomatic partner, a counter-terrorism partner, and, ultimately, Afghanistan’s de facto ruler.
At the center of this paradox stands one man: Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. Three distinct snapshot moments illustrate the absurdity of America’s Afghan dilemma.
The first occurred on August 16, 2021. I was stranded on the tarmac at Hamid Karzai International Airport as the Taliban entered the city. Through the assistance of General H.R. McMaster, I entered the NATO-controlled sector of the airfield. From that vantage point, an extraordinary, surreal scene unfolded: Armed Taliban pickup trucks carrying cheering fighters rolled into Kabul from one direction, while massive U.S. military transports landed from another, disgorging American troops. The war was over, yet the victors and the defeated were arriving simultaneously, with U.S. forces not defending a political order the United States spent two decades constructing but, rather, evacuating its nationals and a small number of Afghan allies.
The second irony emerged in post-withdrawal financial wilderness. Today, American banks will require Afghan financial institutions to certify that an ordinary wire transfer carries no direct or indirect connection to the Taliban or the Haqqani Network—yet Washington has channeled billions of dollars to Afghanistan, where Taliban bureaucrats administer almost every commercial mechanism. The U.S. Department of the Treasury clarifies that its actions are humanitarian, meant to stave off starvation, yet the absurdity remains. Congress may attempt to cut off pathways that empower the regime, but resistance by Taliban lobbyists within Congress has stalled these legislative efforts.
The third scene unfolded on September 7, 2026, in Kabul. Taliban officials, including three on the United Nations sanctions list formally signed a $200 million energy extraction deal with Saudi Arabia’s Delta International Energy. The 25-year contract covers hydrocarbon exploration across seven blocks in the Kushk-Tirpul basin. Zalmay Khalilzad supervised the signing, welcoming the deal he reportedly facilitated behind closed doors.
History repeats. Saudi Arabia was one of only three states to recognize the original, pre-9/11 Taliban regime. Decades ago, prior to his George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden administration appointments, Khalilzad lobbied for Taliban recognition as part of Unocal’s high-stakes efforts to build an energy corridor through Afghanistan.
The Saudi-Taliban deal raises questions first about Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s coherence. He pitches Vision 2030 as a modernization program, framing the Kingdom’s future around moderate Islam, economic diversification, social liberalization, and inclusive international integration, but greenlights a prominent Saudi enterprise to pledge millions to a fundamentalist regime. Second, Khalilzad’s consistent mercantilism and tolerance for the Taliban raise questions about whether he used his government interlude as ambassador and envoy to advance U.S. interests or to pursue his own.
Khalilzad is not the only architect of America’s Afghanistan failure. Four successive U.S. presidents, the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, a reactive Congress, regional players in Islamabad, Tehran, and Moscow, and the rank corruption of Afghan political elites all contributed to Afghanistan’s collapse. Yet Khalilzad wielded a combination of cultural intimacy, elite access, and diplomatic latitude. Born in Mazar-i-Sharif into a Pashtun family, educated at the University of Chicago, and elevated to the highest corridors of American power, he possessed the rare ability to speak fluent Washington strategic prose while navigating the intricate ethnic, tribal and political dynamics of his homeland.
His background offered insight, but in a nation where multi-ethnic equilibrium is the guarantor of state survival, Khalilzad favored Pashtun political hegemony. In the post-9/11 vacuum, Khalilzad positioned himself as America’s sole interpreter of Afghanistan. The presidents and secretaries of State he served did not recognize his ulterior motives and agendas.
He first leveraged his position at the 2001 Bonn Conference. Tasked with crafting a post-Taliban government, delegates weighed various governance models—including a constitutional monarchy under King Zahir Shah or a decentralized parliamentary system. Khalilzad steered the outcome toward a centralized presidential executive. His rationale was understandable: Afghanistan required a strong central authority to bring the country together; he worked to sideline Zahir Shah, who had established national credentials as Khalilzad supposedly considered running the country himself.
By signing the February 2020 Doha Agreement directly with the Taliban, while excluding the Afghan government from the primary negotiations, Washington undermined its ally.
By co-opting legacy warlords into this centralized system without building democratic institutions, Washington institutionalized factional corruption—allowing the Taliban to present itself as the only disciplined alternative to a broken political class. By the time President Donald Trump appointed Khalilzad as Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation in 2018, the assignment was no longer state-building but, rather, engineering an exit. To execute this, Khalilzad engaged in a multi-front diplomatic game. He promised Washington an honorable, negotiated withdrawal; he offered the Taliban a timetable for American withdrawal and elevation as the future ruler of Afghanistan. He treated President Ashraf Ghani as an impediment to Khalilzad’s Taliban-centric vision of peace.
By signing the February 2020 Doha Agreement directly with the Taliban, while excluding the Afghan government from the primary negotiations, Washington undermined its ally. The Taliban received its demand—U.S. troop withdrawal—without making meaningful concessions to the Afghan state. This shattered the resilience of the republic before the first Taliban technical reached Kabul. Although Biden eventually elevated Khalilzad’s deputy, Thomas West, to succeed Khalilzad as special representative, Biden and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sought continuity of Khalilzad’s strategy rather than adjustment.
In short, America negotiated with the hope of moderating the Taliban, while the Taliban negotiated to win total control without altering its core ideology. Khalilzad knew the direction the Taliban took but prioritized cultivating his own contacts with the group before pursuing commercial opportunities with them.
