Afghanistan's arc from 9/11 to today

The bodies of foreign Arabs who had stayed behind were mutilated and bloodied.

They had been found and killed by advancing Afghans of another faction who were brought to the city by a blistering US-led campaign that drove the Taliban from power.

America was still reeling from the horrific terrorist attacks of two months earlier, when planes flown by al-Qaeda terrorists crashed into three iconic buildings and a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 3000 people.

The perpetrators and their leader, Osama bin Laden, were somewhere in Afghanistan, sheltered by the Taliban. The mission: Find him. Bring him to justice.

Right then, Afghanistan - two decades of disorder behind it, two decades more just ahead - was suspended in an in-between moment. Nothing was certain, but much seemed possible.

Against that backdrop, Afghans understood the mission against bin Laden to mean a chance to secure their future - a future as murky on that day as it is today.

In those post-2001 months and years, they believed in the power of "the foreigners."

From hundreds of years ago right up to the jumbled chaos of recent weeks as the US pulled out of its air base and then the capital, the word "foreigner" has meant many things in the Afghan context, from invaders to would-be colonisers. But in November 2001, it meant hope.

"I found the people relieved fresh and full on energy to start anew," says Torek Farhadi, who joined scores of educated and trained Afghan expatriates who returned to their homeland in 2002 after the Taliban were gone.

The arrival of the US-led coalition weeks after the September 11 attacks ended a repressive, religiously radical regime that had more in common with the sixth century than the 21st.

Mullah Mohammad Omar, the reclusive one-eyed leader of the Taliban, had brought the village to the city.

The strict edicts he taught at his one-room mud madrassa, or religious school, became law. Girls were denied education. Women were confined to their homes or, when in public, inside the all-encompassing burqa. Men were told to wear beards. Television was banned, as was all music but religious chants.

When the Taliban fled and the new, post 9/11 leader, Hamid Karzai, entered the sprawling presidential palace, he discovered the Taliban had left their mark.

Wall-to-wall hand-painted miniature murals had been defaced; Taliban who believed images of living things were a crime against Islam went to every tiny bird and blotted out its face with a black marker.

The running of the country was handed to Washington's Afghan allies, many of whom had destroyed Kabul with their bitter feuding when they last ruled. Under their corruption, the country devolved into a collection of fiefdoms that enriched local warlords and led to the Taliban's rise.

The Afghan military that would collapse in the wake of Taliban advances in 2021 began existence with its recruits often more loyal to a warlord than the army itself. Training was barely eight weeks for new, generally uneducated men.

So across Afghanistan, quickly and understandably, it started: The defeated Taliban began to re-emerge. And it kept getting worse.

By 2012, just two years before the US and NATO handed over the operational end of the war to Afghanistan's government, the Afghan army was barely competent and filled with fighters angry at what they considered poor treatment by their foreign trainers.

The return last month of the Taliban has created widespread fear among young people in Afghanistan's cities - places where urban girls wearing headscarves have felt free to mingle in coffee shops and on the street.

Young men wearing Western dress who dream of even greater freedoms have been part of the airport chaos that greeted the start of evacuation flights.

The Taliban leaders promise a different Taliban this time.

Once camera shy and reclusive, many have made regular appearances on the diplomatic stage. And while the Taliban's original rule was marked by relentless repression that denied women a public space, they now say women can work, attend school and participate in public life.

Twenty years and billions of dollars in investment after 9/11, Afghanistan was considered one of the worst places in the world to be a woman in 2020 and in 2019, according to the Georgetown Institute for Women Peace and Security.

In the first years after 9/11, US money arrived in Kabul in suitcases. There were no working banks at the time - and no oversight of the billions pouring into the country. Most of it passed through the hands of US-allied warlords whose corruption had led to the Taliban's rise in the 1990s.

American generals were often used by their Afghan allies to exact revenge. Mohabullah, an Afghan who had left the Taliban to return home to the central province of Ghazni, once laughed as he recounted how easily fooled the Americans were by their Afghan partners. He recalled how a petrol station owner was turned in to US forces as a Taliban - to settle a feud.

For those who have watched Afghanistan for years, the scenes of throngs of mostly young men hanging from departing aircraft at Kabul's airport seemed an indictment of the two decades of efforts and the billions of dollars spent.

For many of those men, the desperation to depart was less about fear for their life - and more about finding a new one.

Australian Associated Press