More than two decades after helping overthrow the Taliban and witnessing the birth of Afghanistan’s new government, Don Parnell looks back at what became of the country — and the people — he left behind.
In the final part of this exclusive three-part interview, the former CIA Chief of Ground Branch reflects on the aftermath of the 2001 campaign, his relationship with Hamid Karzai, and the extraordinary experiences that followed the fall of Kandahar.
Parnell shares some of the more human — and at times surprisingly amusing — stories from those days: the personalities he encountered, the friendships forged under extraordinary circumstances, and the strange, mundane and occasionally absurd problems that existed alongside the deadly serious business of war. His recollections offer a glimpse of Afghanistan rarely captured in official histories: not simply strategy, intelligence and politics, but the people, humour and everyday realities behind them.
He also recalls returning to Afghanistan and being honoured by President Hamid Karzai with Afghanistan’s Wazir Akbar Khan Medal, alongside the late former King Mohammad Zahir Shah — an extraordinary moment in a relationship that had begun amid the chaos of war.
Parnell reflects on the Afghans he worked alongside and the personal cost of watching a mission that once seemed so full of possibility end with the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. Speaking candidly about the US withdrawal and the fate of people he knew and cared about, his verdict is strikingly simple: “It hurts.”
Looking back across the twenty-year intervention, Parnell discusses the constant rotation of commanders, the drift from the original counterterrorism mission into nation-building, and what he believes was a fundamental misunderstanding of Afghanistan itself. In his view, attempts to construct a highly centralised Western-style state failed to account for the country’s local, tribal and regional realities.
Yet this concluding episode is as much about people as politics. Parnell remembers the Afghans he fought and worked alongside, the risks they took, the bonds created in war, and the extraordinary contrast between the optimism of 2001 and the collapse two decades later.
Funny, candid, poignant and at times painful, this is the concluding chapter of a remarkable first-hand account from a CIA officer who witnessed the Taliban’s first regime fall — and, twenty years later, watched the Taliban return.
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