If you listen to the media, our withdrawal from Afghanistan was a "betrayal", while our occupation of the country was benevolent and costless. That assumes the media reported on our 20-year long occupation at all.

It took a nationwide resurgence of the bearded, brutal, cruelly misogynistic Taliban — picture-perfect antagonists for American audiences — to wrench Afghan civilians from the bottom of the priority pile, as if life in Afghanistan before last weekend had been a rosy affair.

You can't make our withdrawal into a "catastrophe" unless you first make the assumption that things were going well. It's hard to square that with the fact that Afghanistan became the most drone-bombed country in the world.

“The status quo of two weeks ago was far better than what is coming...America should keep a few thousand forces in a country that have prevented the atrocities that are now unfolding.”
- Eli Lake

The reality is the EXACT opposite.

As the missile fired off of the drone’s rails, there would be about a five-second delay until it struck the man on the motorcycle.

Suddenly, the man in blue hit an intersection in the road just as another motorcycle with two adult riders who were also carrying a toddler passed by coming in the other direction. The missile was already in flight, and there was nothing anyone in the strike cell or any of the drone operators could do to stop it. The missile impacted the ground at the intersection, stirring up a cloud of gray and brown dust.

The man in blue, the Afghan with the radio who they had been tracking for six hours, “like a Bond villain goes through the cloud of smoke and drives off,” said a U.S. military official involved in the operation who spoke on the condition of anonymity. No one ever knew his name or who he was, or if he ever had any actual Taliban connections. “The two adults and a toddler on the other motorcycle, they were killed right off,” the official said.

Everyone on the conference call stopped talking. “It got real quiet,” the official recalled.

That same year, 2019, a U.S. drone strike killed 32 poor Afghan farmers. Just days later in 2019, the U.S. drone'd yet another Afghanistan wedding, killing at least 40 civilians.
That is at least the seventh Afghan wedding that we've bombed.
To give you an example, take a look at the 2008 Haska Meyna wedding massacre. The first bomb killed the children in the wedding party. The second bomb killed most of the rest of the wedding participants. However, the bride and a few bridesmaids survived the first two bombs and tried to run, which was when the final bomb was dropped.

“We are like ants for them. The murderers need to face a trial. If it’s not happening, it just reveals that the Western world does not care about the Afghans they are murdering.”
- Islam Khan

The American news media feels no need to shed any tears over these pointless deaths. After all, they are just Afghanis. It's not like we were responsible for murdering actual human beings, amirite?
Well, they weren't actual human beings that we were murdering by the thousands, until we pulled out our troops. Then suddenly, every death there becomes our responsibility. Unlike when we were intentionally slaughtering Afghanis. At least this is what the news media is trying to convince you of. When we were actually pulling the trigger, we had no responsibility of any kind for slaughtering innocent children. It wasn't even important enough to verify.

According to a recent analysis of 228 official U.S. military investigations conducted in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria between 2002 and 2015, most investigations of alleged civilian casualty incidents didn’t include even one visit. The military conducted site inspections in only 16 percent of the casualty investigations reviewed for the study by researchers from the Center for Civilians in Conflict and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.

The news media completely ignored a U.N. report a couple months ago that detailed how 40% of the people killed by U.S. bombings were children, and that a majority of civilians that died were murdered by NATO, not by the Taliban.

I don't want to overload this essay with examples of our war crimes, but it's necessary not to leave an impression that these instances were rare.

The airstrikes happened after Afghan forces asked for American air support. American forces bombed crowded houses and a mosque. AIHRC’s findings indicated 97 people died, including 21 women and 65 children, and 19 people were injured. The community and the survivors live in poverty, the compensation by the Afghan government has been ad-hoc, and there has been no full acknowledgement of all the harm caused by U.S. forces.

An earlier example that sent shockwaves throughout Afghan society was the airstrike and bombing in Azizabad, Herat Province on Aug. 22, 2008. In this incident, in a joint operation of U.S. and Afghan forces, 91 people were killed. Sixty children (from a 5-month old to an 18-year old) and 16 women, as well elderly, were among those killed. The bombing started at 2 a.m. local time, and went on till 8 a.m.

When the International Criminal Court began collecting material for a war crimes case involving Afghanistan, it got a staggering 1.17 million statements from Afghans who say they were victims. Because one statement might include multiple victims and one organization might represent thousands of victim statements, the number of Afghans seeking justice from the ICC could be several million.
The U.S. not only refuses to investigate our war crimes, we have done everything possible to obstruct the ICC. When Australia did an independent investigation of their troops in Afghanistan, it found multiple war crimes, some of them were committed along with other NATO forces.

Daniel Hale testified at his trial, about our indiscriminate murder-by-drone of innocent Afghans that led him to become a whistleblower "military contractors bonding by watching footage of old drone strikes, mocking the deaths of men they’d never know."
Some soldiers deployed to the country were just genuine sadists who liked to torture and kill for the fun of it.

It’s apparently so bad among elite US soldiers, in fact, that the leader of the US Navy’s special forces has outright stated that “we have a problem,” and the Pentagon’s inspector general has now launched an inquiry into war crimes they committed.