Five years after the fall of Kabul, 'war on terror' ghosts have come home

Five years after the fall of Kabul, 'war on terror' ghosts have come home Submitted by Moazzam Begg on Thu, 08/20/2026 - 16:32 From Bagram to Camp Bucca, the West's brutal carceral laboratories inadvertently forged the leaderships that would ultimately dismantle its imperial presence Activists representing the men still held at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, protest outside the White House on 11 January 2023 (Alex Wong/Getty Images/AFP) Off Five years ago, the world watched in stunned disbelief as the final American military aircraft left Kabul , bringing a chaotic and humiliating end to a 20-year occupation. The images of desperate people clinging to the fuselages of US military transport planes departing the Afghan capital mirrored the panic of Saigon in 1975 , cementing a visual legacy of imperial overreach. Western media outlets trained their lenses almost exclusively on the runway of Hamid Karzai International Airport, hyper-focusing on the frenzy to manufacture a narrative of total, apocalyptic collapse.