The war in Afghanistan is now over. Joe Biden has decided to pull out all troops.

Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban. And so now we have to ask ourselves, what was the war for?

In order to understand what actually happened in Afghanistan and whether defeat was inevitable,

we have to look at the history of Afghanistan. So today we're going to go through the entire history

of U.S. Afghanistan relations. And we're going to trace exactly where this history of U.S.-Afghanistan relations, and we're

going to trace exactly where this war went right and where it went wrong.

Let's begin in the 1950s. Relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan actually date back to then.

That's when the Eisenhower administration was seeking to bolster ties with the newly formed

Afghan government in order to prevent them from

becoming a Soviet satellite state. This was the middle of the Cold War. So in 1959, for example,

President Eisenhower actually flew to Afghanistan. He led a motorcade to Kabul, meeting with the

king and the prime minister. Between the 50s and 1979, the United States granted about $500 million

in loans, grants, and commodities.

A bunch of NGOs, non-governmental organizations, were working in Afghanistan to try to help the economy over there.

Afghanistan's government remained officially neutral during the Cold War, accepting aid from both sides.

In 1973, General Mohamed Diyadh-Daude Khan, formerly the prime minister of Afghanistan, overthrew the king, whose name was Muhammad Zahir Shah. He replaced the regime with the People's Democratic Party

of Afghanistan. Again, this government remained somewhere in between with regard to the

communist USSR and the United States. Then in 1978, Khan was killed in a communist coup

and was replaced by members of the Communist Party. The new regime

said it wasn't officially in league with the Soviet Union, but it pretty much was. They started

cementing ties with the USSR. They infamously replaced the country's black, red, and green

Islamic flag with a knockoff of the Soviet Union's flag. That coup resulted in a move toward more

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