The last American plane lifts off from Kabul; the twenty-year war is over

For two weeks, Hamid Karzai International Airport had been the only door out of a country the Taliban already controlled. At 11:59 p.m. Kabul time on August 30, 2021, the last US military aircraft cleared its runway, closing out nearly twenty years of American military presence in Afghanistan. Roughly 7,000 troops had surged in over the preceding days to run the evacuation; by the final flight, close to a thousand American citizens and Afghan visa holders were still on the ground. The gate that had processed tens of thousands of evacuees stood empty…