In 2025 a six-part English language television drama titled ‘Kabul’ premiered in France, though it only released in the UK in August of 2026. It is set against the backdrop of American troops leaving Afghanistan in 2021 and showcases the efforts of the representatives of various European governments to deal with the collapse of Kabul, its takeover by the Taliban, and a small group of Afghans trying to escape the city. The show received critical plaudits, is technically well made, and often emotionally effective. Its basic criticisms are hardly objectionable: Western policy in Afghanistan caused enormous suffering, bureaucratic failures compounded that suffering, and the collapse of the Afghan government left many people in desperate circumstances. Its problem is not what it criticizes, but what it leaves out and the way in which it frames these omissions provides a good example of how popular drama can produce a propagandistic political effect without necessarily being propaganda in the conventional sense.
Almost all of Kabul’s primary characters are decent people attempting to do the right thing, while the principal antagonist is the bureaucratic system that prevents them from doing so. The Taliban, by contrast, are presented as authoritarian, misogynistic and violent. This produces a remarkably simple moral narrative: Western intervention was fundamentally well-intentioned but incompetently executed; the Taliban are its morally uncomplicated opposite; and the disaster resulted from a failure to make Western institutions work effectively enough. The Guardian’s review clearly gets this message when it contrasts the Taliban’s “psychopathic aggression and stupid dogma” against the “good-hearted westerner’s” efforts to “save all the people they promised to protect.” That interpretation contains elements of truth, but it leaves out so much of Afghanistan’s political history that it risks producing a conclusion that is both blinkered and highly misleading: that the problem with Western intervention was primarily that it failed.
When the US entered Afghanistan by force in 2001, it did so with enormous international political support, but the precise legal basis for the intervention was, and remains, contested. The US invoked Article 51’s right of self-defense, while critics argued that the operation failed the requirements of necessity and proportionality and that Security Council Resolutions 1368 and 1373 did not themselves authorize the use of force against the Taliban. The Taliban also made proposals regarding the potential transfer of Osama bin Laden to a third country, although Washington rejected these as inadequate. In effect, the US was given a free pass to attack the Taliban government, destroy their infrastructure, overthrow the regime, install a heavily Western-dependent Afghan government, and sustain a large-scale military presence in the country for just shy of twenty years. The decades of conflict resulted in an estimated 176,000 direct deaths in the Afghanistan/Pakistan war zone, at an estimated US budgetary cost of more than $2.3 trillion.
Was the intervention really driven primarily by democracy, women’s rights and improving Afghan lives? Clearly not, and when Kabul describes a leading pro-Western Afghan general as responsible for “rebuilding hospitals and opening schools for girls” and “the future of Afghanistan”, it reduces a complex geopolitical project to childish black-and-white storytelling. The US openly identified other strategic objectives, yet, unlike Iraq, Afghanistan was not primarily a resource grab. The country’s strategic value has historically derived more from its location than its natural wealth. US officials have repeatedly described its importance in strategic terms: Henry Kissinger emphasized its role in containing regional jihadism and stabilizing Pakistan, while General David Petraeus later called preventing Afghanistan from becoming an extremist hub a ‘vital national security interest’. A US presence in Afghanistan also acts as a buffer against Russian, Chinese, and Iranian activity in the region. Without access to bases at Bagram and Kandahar, US intelligence gathering capabilities in Afghanistan fell to 1-2% of their previous levels, and they were forced to fall back to bases such as Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, some 2,500km from Kabul. While the US has referred to democracy and women’s rights as “important goals”, it is clear they were secondary to key strategic aims.
In a 2020 survey of popular sentiment in Afghanistan by the Asia Foundation, 58.4% of people said they would be willing to accept some Taliban role in the national government, with 27.4% saying they would be very willing. This did not mean that a majority wanted Taliban rule: 87.9% considered protecting women’s rights very important in any peace agreement. The reality was that the Taliban could simultaneously be unpopular while benefiting from war-weariness, security provision, nationalism, and dissatisfaction with the Western-backed state. That they offered meaningful change can be seen in the dramatic drop in the level of armed conflict and civilian casualties after the Taliban takeover. Although ISIS-K continued to create widespread harm through terrorist attacks, the month-on-month civilian casualties were five times lower than they were during the height of the conflict. It is also important that this was framed by the Taliban not as the victory of a devout Islamic faction against an opposing Afghan faction, but as successful resistance to foreign occupation and the start of a coherent national project. It might not have represented the truth, but it had powerful political appeal for a fragmented country.
The Taliban’s justice system was another factor. Their ultra-conservative interpretation of Sunni Islam, rooted in Hanafi jurisprudence and strongly influenced by Deobandi traditions and Afghan tribal norms, was exceptionally restrictive of women’s fundamental rights. Yet many Afghans regarded Taliban justice as faster, more accessible and less corrupt than the formal system that existed during the war, despite its harsh punishments and incompatibility with liberal human-rights standards. The result was an oppressive but functioning system replacing a nominally democratic one that was often corrupt and ineffective.
This is part of the key flaw in Kabul’s representation of Western individuals in Afghanistan as entirely noble. The West did not simply arrive with doctors, nurses, engineers and aid workers. It also brought soldiers and private contractors implicated in civilian abuses and war crimes, reconstruction contractors who carried out massive fraud, intelligence personnel involved in torture and rendition, and political and business operators willing to work with Afghan warlords and criminal networks. Kabul shows none of this darker side of the Western presence.
More importantly, however, it omits the grey areas between humanitarianism and outright abuse. We see none of the consultants producing unrealistic development plans, contractors building infrastructure they knew would be difficult to maintain, military personnel pursuing counterinsurgency strategies that endangered civilians, or bureaucrats designing programs to demonstrate measurable success rather than improve Afghan lives. Instead, the series presents almost exclusively the white nobility of intervention: a blinkered and morally selective view that weakens it artistically as well as politically. The show could have been a much richer, more complex and more honest examination of a critical period in Afghanistan’s history.
The political implications go further. There is a serious argument that US policy after 2001 marginalized Taliban figures more willing to pursue political accommodation and negotiation. There were opportunities to explore whether settlements could have recognized the Taliban as a political force while making international recognition, reconstruction assistance and political participation conditional on minimum human-rights standards. Instead, hardline approaches contributed to the replacement of the Taliban with a highly corrupt, factional and internationally dependent state containing warlords, militias and extensive human-rights abuses, albeit within a liberal constitutional framework. Kabul instead tells a tale of Islamic authoritarianism against Western liberal ideals, potentially leaving the viewer with the impression that the fundamental problem was not the intervention itself, but a failure to execute it effectively.
Any future US return to Afghanistan would be driven primarily by the geostrategic interests outlined above, not humanitarian concerns. Trump’s repeated interest in regaining control of Bagram, specifically because of its proximity to China, illustrates this. The Taliban have recently signaled willingness to normalize relations and welcome US investment, while the UN has called for such engagement to be tied to improved human rights. If, however, the Taliban eventually offered military access to former US bases alongside lucrative mining and development contracts, the precedent of US cooperation with authoritarian states suggests that strategic concessions could outweigh human-rights concerns. Djibouti is instructive: the US has maintained a continuous military presence there for 24 years despite substantial gender inequalities, although the country has since made meaningful progress in girls’ education, political representation and protection against gender-based violence.
The important point is that such improvements in human rights are not the underlying motive for Western interventions, and this is what Kabul fails to transmit. Such interventions are not conducted purely by ‘good people for good reasons’; they are driven by political agendas, populated by a collection of morally black, gray, and white figures, and deal with factional groups that have their own depths, nuances, and sources of popular support. There is nothing implausible about individual Western officials genuinely caring about Afghans. The problem is the leap from individual morality to institutional purpose. A diplomat can sincerely want to save an Afghan family while representing a government whose reasons for maintaining a military presence are primarily strategic. Those two propositions are not contradictory. As mere entertainment, Kabul is worth watching but, in terms of understanding Afghanistan, it represents a limited, and potentially harmful, understanding of a complex issue.
(Featured Image: “BOMBED ROYAL PALACE, KABUL, AFGHANISTAN” by Tahirshah999 is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0)
