Embassy of the United States, Kabul

• 1. Introduction

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  The Embassy of the United States in Kabul stood on Great Massoud Road in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood, a building that cost nearly $800 million to construct and that many assumed would anchor American diplomacy in Afghanistan for generations. On the 15th of August, 2021, that assumption collapsed in a single afternoon. What happened to the people inside, to the flag on the wall, and to the country itself reveals a great deal about what American presence in Afghanistan meant and what its end looked like.

  The embassy's story stretches back to 1942, when the United States first established a formal legation in Kabul, and forward to a makeshift diplomatic operation run out of an airport terminal in Doha, Qatar. Between those two points lie assassinated ambassadors, Marine raids in the dead of night, rocket attacks on visa applicants, and a frantic helicopter airlift compared in real time to the fall of Saigon. The questions worth carrying through this story are not simply about how a building was lost. They are about why so much was built, what it was meant to protect, and what remained when it was gone.

• 2. A Century of American Presence

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  William H. Hornibrook holds a peculiar distinction in American diplomatic history: he served as the first U.S. minister to Afghanistan while simultaneously accredited to Iran. The arrangement reflected how peripheral Afghanistan was to American strategic thinking in those early decades. A proper legation in Kabul was not established until 1942.

  Louis G. Dreyfus had already served in Afghanistan as Minister Plenipotentiary from 1941 to 1942 before the post was elevated to a full ambassadorship. He returned as the first U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, serving from 1949 to 1951. The promotion from legation to embassy in May 1948 signaled that Washington was beginning to take Afghanistan seriously as a sovereign partner.

  The most violent chapter of this early history came in 1979, when Ambassador Adolph Dubs was kidnapped and ultimately assassinated under circumstances that were never fully explained. His death cast a long shadow over the mission. A decade later, the embassy closed entirely in 1989, before the civil war that would eventually bring the Taliban to power for the first time. The 1996-2001 Taliban government, which referred to itself as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, made any American diplomatic presence impossible.

• 3. Marines at Midnight

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  In early December 2001, a small detachment of U.S. Marines was tasked with retaking a building that had sat empty for more than a decade. The unit came from Kilo Battery, 3rd Battalion, 10th Marines, with a four-man Scout/Sniper team from 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines attached. They were part of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which specialized in embassy reinforcement.

  The operation was part of one of the longest amphibious operations in Marine Corps history. The assault began from landing craft air cushion vessels into Pakistan, continued to Bagram Airfield before it was fully secured, and eventually reached Kabul. To avoid detection in the city, the Marines secured Afghan private buses and drove them themselves, disguising their approach as ordinary civilian traffic.

  They set up camp inside a factory building, then moved on the embassy in the early morning hours. When they secured it, they held the compound until Diplomatic Security Services personnel arrived to handle the sensitive materials still locked inside. Later that month, this same unit raised the U.S. flag over the embassy. It was the same flag that had flown there on the day the embassy closed in 1989.

• 4. Attacks and Expansion

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  President George W. Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai held an inauguration ceremony for the new embassy complex in early 2006. A $500 million expansion was subsequently planned, with completion originally scheduled for 2014, then pushed to July 2016. By the time construction finished, the chancery had cost $792 million in total.

  Violence reached the compound repeatedly while the construction and expansion were underway. On the 13th of September, 2011, heavily armed Taliban fighters wearing suicide vests struck multiple buildings across Kabul; at least 7 people were killed and 19 wounded across the city. The embassy was among the targeted buildings, and several Afghan visa applicants waiting outside were wounded. No embassy personnel were hurt, but another deadly attack struck an embassy annex later that same month.

  On the 15th of April, 2012, Taliban elements attacked the embassy again as part of a coordinated nationwide assault. Afghan security forces repelled the attack. General John Allen, then commanding the International Security Assistance Force, credited their response publicly. On the 11th of September, 2019, a rocket struck the embassy compound on the 18th anniversary of the attacks that had originally sent U.S. forces to Afghanistan.

  Then, in June 2021, before any Taliban fighter had entered Kabul, the embassy faced a different kind of crisis. A COVID-19 outbreak infected 159 embassy workers by the 22nd of June. There were several medical evacuations and at least one death. Remote work was mandated for all staff, and the mission was already stretched thin.

• 5. The Withdrawal Begins

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  On the 14th of April, 2021, President Biden announced that all regular U.S. troops would leave Afghanistan by the 11th of September, 2021. Two weeks later, on the 27th of April, the State Department instructed any embassy employees whose work could be done elsewhere to leave. Officials described this as routine consolidation, not a sign of alarm.

  The plan called for approximately 650 Marines to remain in Kabul to protect diplomats after the military withdrawal, with some also assigned to guard Hamid Karzai International Airport. Navy Rear Admiral Peter Vasely led the 650-strong security mission. On the 2nd of July, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin approved a new command structure for these remaining forces, with Vasely as senior U.S. military officer in Kabul. He reported to General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. at U.S. Central Command.

  By the 7th of August, with the Taliban advancing far faster than American intelligence had anticipated, the embassy issued a security alert urging all American citizens to leave Afghanistan immediately. The embassy offered repatriation loans to help U.S. citizens pay for commercial flights out of the country. Negotiators reportedly sought assurances from the Taliban that the embassy compound would not be attacked even if Taliban forces overran the city.

• 6. Evacuation and Collapse

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  On the 12th of August, the State Department announced a partial evacuation. Of the 4,000 people then working at the embassy, 1,400 were U.S. citizens. Around 3,000 soldiers and Marines were deployed to Kabul to assist the evacuation, with a contingency force of 3,500 soldiers sent to Kuwait in case Taliban forces attacked during the operation.

  Chargé d'Affaires Ross Wilson fled the embassy for Hamid Karzai Airport on the 15th of August, according to reporting by the BBC. Military helicopters made repeated trips between the compound and the airport, firing flares to deter rocket attacks during the flights. Staff were ordered beforehand to destroy classified documents, electronics, equipment, and American flags that could be misused for propaganda purposes.

  By 7:00 pm local time on August 15, all embassy staff had been relocated to the airport. Wilson himself was evacuated to the airport around 7:50 pm local time. The embassy's U.S. flag was sent to the airport with him. Kabul had fallen without a fight: Taliban forces entered the city, occupied police districts, and took power through an interim government arrangement announced by acting Interior Minister Abdul Sattar Mirzakwal.

  By the morning of August 16, desperate Afghan civilians had stormed the airport's civilian side. Three Afghans died after clinging to the hulls of planes and falling. A total of seven people died in the chaos around the aircraft. The Air Force Office of Special Investigations opened an inquiry into the deaths on the 17th of August, assisted by Air Mobility Command.

• 7. The Saigon Comparison

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  On the 8th of July, 2021, before the Taliban had captured a single provincial capital, President Biden said publicly that there was "going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy" as had happened in Saigon. By mid-August, that image was everywhere.

  Press observers drew explicit comparisons between the Kabul helicopter airlift and the 1975 fall of Saigon, when North Vietnamese forces took the South Vietnamese capital and Americans evacuated alongside South Vietnamese allies. Both conflicts were described as long American campaigns in foreign wars with ambiguous outcomes. Both evacuations were described as frenzied.

  On the 13th of August, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Biden's actions were sending the U.S. toward "an even worse sequel to the humiliating fall of Saigon." On August 14, Representative Steve Scalise called it "Biden's Saigon moment." On August 15, Secretary of State Antony Blinken explicitly rejected the comparison on two television networks, arguing the larger military presence produced a more orderly evacuation. In his August 16 remarks, Biden himself drew a parallel between Afghanistan and Vietnam but did not address the Saigon evacuation specifically.

  One detail cut through the political noise. The iconic 1975 photograph that many people associate with the fall of Saigon does not show the U.S. Embassy in Saigon at all. It shows 22 Gia Long Street, a nearby apartment building. The image of American retreat had always been slightly misattributed.

• 8. Doha and After

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  Wilson left Kabul on the last U.S. military flight out of the country at 23:59 local time on the 30th of August. All embassy staff had reportedly been evacuated by August 28. The following day, the embassy formally suspended operations and transferred limited functions to Doha, Qatar, with Deputy Chief of Mission Ian McCary taking over as Chargé d'Affaires.

  The embassy had no Senate-confirmed ambassador at the moment of the Taliban takeover. It had operated for those final months under Wilson's authority as Chargé d'Affaires, a rank below a full ambassador.

  On the 12th of November, 2021, the United States announced that an interests section would open at the Embassy of Qatar in Kabul on the 31st of December, giving Qatar responsibility as the U.S. protecting power in Afghanistan. Under that arrangement, Qatar assumed custodial responsibility for the former U.S. Embassy compound on Great Massoud Road. As of August 2022, one year after Kabul's fall, the compound was described as being in a state of lockdown, not used by any person or entity.