What connects Damascus’s announcement of an agreement with Moscow to regulate Russia’s military presence in Syria with Kabul’s commemoration of the anniversary of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan?
Weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the United States went to war in Afghanistan, toppled Taliban rule and pursued al-Qaeda. It then spent two decades trying to build a state, a political order and an army capable of preventing the movement from returning to power. On 15 August 2021, US forces suddenly withdrew; the Taliban immediately stepped in to fill the security vacuum, and the US-backed government led by President Ashraf Ghani collapsed, and he fled the country. This chaotic scene became an enduring symbol of American defeat.
Yet Afghanistan’s story as the “graveyard of empires” goes much further back: to the British campaigns of the 18th and 19th centuries, and to the Soviet experience at the end of the 1970s. In 1979, the Red Army entered Afghanistan, while the US and its allies backed the Afghan mujahideen. Nearly a decade later, the Soviets withdrew. That resounding defeat became one of the forces that helped pry Russia loose from the red mantle of the Soviet order.
The great powers changed. Afghanistan remained.
When the Taliban came back to power in Kabul five years ago, celebrations of their victory were not confined to Afghanistan. In Syria’s Idlib, then groaning under Russian air strikes and attacks by Assad’s forces, sweets were handed out. Fighters there saw in the Afghan experience proof that time itself could become a weapon, and that a superpower, however many aircraft, bases and allies it possessed, did not remain forever.
Around three years later, in December 2024, Ahmed al-Sharaa’s forces entered Damascus. The regime fell, and Assad fled to Moscow. Russia, which had intervened militarily in Syria in 2015 to save him, suddenly found itself confronted by memories of its Afghan wounds. After nine years of political and military support, the ally Russia had come to protect had fallen.
