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KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) The U.S. military has begun shipping equipment and winding down contracts with local service providers ahead of the May 1 start of the final phase of its military pullout from Afghanistan, a U.S. Defense Department official said Thursday.

The pullout under U.S. President Joe Biden marks the end of Americas longest war after a 20-year military engagement. Currently, some 2,500 U.S. soldiers and about 7,000 allied forces are still in Afghanistan.

In February last year, the U.S. military began closing its smaller bases. In mid-April, the Biden administration announced that the final phase of the withdrawal would begin May 1 and be completed before Sept. 11.

Since then, the military has been shipping equipment and winding down local contracts for services such as trash pickup and maintenance work, the U.S. official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with briefing regulations.

While preparations are under way, troops likely wont begin to depart for a few weeks, he said, adding that we wont see a coming down of the (troop) numbers until remaining bases close.

There have been indications that the pullout could be completed well before Sept. 11, which marks the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaida terror attack on the U.S. and the trigger for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, Germanys Defense Ministry said discussions are underway among military planners with the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission in Kabul for a possible withdrawal of international troops from Afghanistan as early as July 4.

In the short term, America will likely increase its troop presence in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said last Friday. The additional troops would be in Afghanistan over the coming weeks and months to help with what the herculean task of wrapping up 20 years of war.

While much of the equipment headed back to the U.S. will be shipped by air, the military will also use land routes through Pakistan and north through Central Asia, the Defense Department official said.

The U.S. equipment that is neither shipped back to America nor given to the Afghan National Security forces will be sold to contractors, who will, in turn, sell it in the local markets.

Youll most likely start seeing it eventually showing up in bazaars as scrap, said the official.

The Taliban, meanwhile, were non-committal when asked by the AP whether the insurgents would attack departing U.S. and NATO troops. Its too early for these issues, nothing can be said about the future, said Taliban spokesman Mohammad Naeem.

In a deal the Taliban signed last year with former President Donald Trump, the final U.S. withdrawal deadline was set as May 1. Under the agreement, the Taliban promised not to attack U.S. and NATO troops but they also later promised consequences if Washington defied the May 1 deadline.

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US troops in Afghanistan begin packing gear in pullout prep - Associated Press

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says that the Biden administration is working with Congress to provide nearly $300 million in additional aid for Afghanistan in 2021.

"The funding will be targeted at sustaining and building on the gains of the past 20 years by improving access to essential services for Afghan citizens, promoting economic growth, fighting corruption and the narcotics trade, improving health and education service delivery, supporting women's empowerment, enhancing conflict resolution mechanisms, and bolstering Afghan civil society and independent media," Blinken said in a statement.

The move comes as the United States and NATO have announced they are withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan. President Joe Biden has said U.S. military forces will be out of the country by Sept. 11.

Blinken made a surprise visit to Afghanistan last week to reassure officials there that Washington would still be committed to the country, where U.S. troops have been stationed since 2001 following the September 11 attacks when terrorists flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, outside Washington. Another hijacked plane crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

When Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, was in office, the U.S. reached an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces by May 1. Biden's pushing back the deadline angered the insurgent group, which said the move was a violation of the agreement.

Over the course of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, more than 2,200 U.S. troops have been killed and 20,000 wounded. It is estimated that the U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion on the war, America's longest.

According to the World Bank, more than half of Afghans live on less than $1.90 a day. It is also considered one of the worst countries for women's rights, according to the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security.

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Biden Administration Seeking $300 Million in Aid to Afghanistan - Voice of America

For half a century, through war, anarchy and upheaval, Afghanistan has been stripped of tens of thousands of Buddhist and Hindu antiquities, some dating back more than 1,800 years.

Many of those items entered the Western market in the 1990s and early 2000s, St John Simpson, a curator at the British Museum, told The New York Times last month. And all of those, he said, were almost certainly illegally exported or stolen.

On Monday, 33 of those antiquities, valued at $1.8 million, were handed over to the Afghan ambassador, Roya Rahmani, by the Manhattan district attorneys office and the Department of Homeland Security, at a ceremony in New York.

The artifacts were part of a hoard of 2,500 objects valued at $143 million seized in a dozen raids between 2012 and 2014 from Subhash Kapoor, a disgraced Manhattan art dealer currently jailed in India on smuggling and theft charges.

Upon receiving the items, many of them delicate heads made from stucco, clay and a soft stone known as schist, a grateful Ms. Rahmani nonetheless warned that the environment that allows for the plundering of Afghanistans treasured antiquities is the same environment that allows for the perpetuation of conflict.

Traffickers are not just robbing Afghanistan of its history, she added. They are perpetuating a situation where peace does not manifest and the region does not stabilize. Looting Afghanistans past is looting Afghanistans future.

Much of the destruction and plunder of Afghan relics and religious icons took place under the Taliban, who destroyed the famed sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan, a pair of enormous carvings, in 2001. In the face of near-universal condemnation, officials dynamited the works, which stood in tall niches hewed from a sheer sandstone cliff.

The objects repatriated on Monday will be housed in the National Museum in Kabul. Afghan officials have said they were confident they could now safeguard their museums and cultural institutions against plunder and smuggling.

According to UNESCO, the Afghan authorities have taken important steps to prevent the theft, smuggling and desecration of cultural objects. Those steps include a separate new police force tasked with protecting cultural sites, up-to-date museum security systems, and educational campaigns aimed at convincing anyone who finds lost or forgotten relics to turn them over to the government.

During the ceremony, the Afghan ambassador praised the office of the district attorney, Cy Vance Jr., for arranging the return. Mr. Vances Antiquities Trafficking Unit, overseen by the Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos, said that over the past decade, it has recovered several thousand stolen antiquities collectively valued at more than $175 million, from more than a dozen nations.

Since August, the unit has overseen the return of 338 objects to seven nations, among them Nepal, Sri Lanka, Egypt and Pakistan, with more to be sent back once the countries involved resolve travel and transport issues related to the pandemic.

Crimes involving looted and stolen religious relics, Mr. Vance said, not only tear at the societal fabric of nations but also deprive millions of believers worldwide of the earliest sacred symbols of their faith.

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Looted Objects From Afghanistan Are Returned - The New York Times

Americas forever war in Afghanistan is an investment of kinds, albeit one ofblood and treasure. To put things in financial terms, that investment is being written offabandoned, essentiallywith President Joe Bidens decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from the country by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of al-Qaedas terror attacks on the U.S. A war that was described as necessaryis now said to be unnecessary. Thatsbound to deepen the pain of families of fallen American and Afghan soldiers,who now have a new reason to askwhether their loved ones died in vain.

Its tempting to say that the U.S. should stay in Afghanistan to protect its huge investment there. Some have argued precisely that. In an op-edin the Washington Post in 2015 directed at President Barack Obama, retired GeneralDavid Petraeus and Brookings Institution scholar Michael OHanlon wrote,The right approach is for Obama to protect our investment in Afghanistan and to hand off to his successor military forces and tools that will still be critically needed in 2017 and beyond. They added that the cost of staying was small in comparison to wellover 2,000 American livesand nearly$1trillion in expense as well as the risk of future attacks on the U.S.emanating from Afghanistan.

Lost investment was also the subtext on April 14, when SenatorLindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina, said, This has been a very long war. The bottom line is they died in defense of their nation. Not in some endless war. They died to make sure this never happens again. That seems like an implicitargument for staying in Afghanistan to make sure their sacrifice was not in vain.

But economists advise us to forget about sunk costshow much has already been investedwhen deciding to go forward with a project (or a war). The logic is that whats done is done, for better or worse, andshould have no bearing on the decision of what to do next. The only thing worse than making a bad investment is stubbornly sticking with it, throwing good money after bad.

Of course a war isnt any ordinary investment.In an age when human sensibility is finely tuned to all the nuances of despair, it still seems important to say of those who die in war that they did not die in vain, the political theorist and philosopher Michael Walzer writes in his 2015 book, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations(italics in the original).

Thats the tragedy of pulling out of Afghanistan now, after so much blood has been spilled. Walzer writes, A just war is one that is morally urgent to win, and a soldier who dies in a just war does not die in vain. By that token, if the war in Afghanistan is no longer judged morally urgent to win, does that imply that a soldier who died in itdied in vain?

A 2009 article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution byWilliam A. Boettcher III and Michael D. Cobb of North Carolina State University found that framing the war in Iraq as an investment to be protectedincreased support for itamong people who supported it already but decreased support for it among those who feltthe U.S. should have stayed out.

Whether Biden made the right decision about withdrawal isnt the questionhere. There are no great options:Staying would have bad consequences and so would leaving. Theres a reason Afghanistan iscalled the graveyard of empires.

The questionis what Biden should have considered inmaking hisfateful stay-or-go decision. He should have focusedand apparently didon the pros and cons of withdrawal while looking aheadrather than looking back on whathappened over the past 20 years. As economists put it: Ignore sunk costs.

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America's War in Afghanistan Is the Mother of All Sunk Costs - Bloomberg

The decision to withdraw the U.S. military from Afghanistan could have been made years ago or years hence: there was never going to be a perfect time, but the time has come, and President Joe Biden has made a difficult but right choice at a moment of historic shifts in global geopolitical realities.

Since 2001, successive U.S. administrations have carried out foreign policy through the prism and primacy of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the global war on terror in the broader Middle East. While Washingtons attention was fixed on these concerns, China emerged as a global strategic competitor and Russia vied for influence in eastern Europe and the Middle East. The United States focused more energy on developing out of area NATO engagement in Afghanistan and the Middle East than on addressing the concerns that preoccupied its partners in Europe. And as the world underwent profound economic and social transformations, the United States spent more than $3 trillion and sent more than two million young Americans to fight and die in these conflicts, while failing to invest in modernizing the U.S. economy, infrastructure, and health and education systems.

And yet if the flood of articles over the past couple of months and the reactions to the presidents announcement are any indication, much of Washington still sees Afghanistan as central to U.S. national security interests. It is not. There is also the implication that the United States has a moral responsibility to remain in Afghanistana notion that slights the enormous sacrifices Americans have already made over the past 20 years. Too much of the body politic resists accepting that the United States has reached the limits of what it can achieve militarily.

Defenders of continued U.S. military engagement rarely account for how much the international environment, and Afghanistans place in it, has changed since the conflict began. Their arguments have become stale.

If, as many argue, the United States should stay in Afghanistan indefinitely to prevent another 9/11 from happening, then it is reasonable to ask why we do not increase our presence in other ungoverned spaces: the Sahel, Somalia, and Iraq are all considerably closer to the United States, and the al Qaeda offshoots and the Islamic State (or ISIS) in these places are significantly more powerful than the terrorist remnants in Afghanistan. In fact, the United States has succeeded in greatly reducing the direct terrorist threat from Afghanistan that was the original rationale for engagement.

If the argument is that the Afghan security forces are still not capable of holding back the Taliban after 20 years and an almost $100 billion investment in their development, shouldnt the question be why not? The United States can sustain its significant commitment to financing Afghanistans armed forces. What does not follow is that American soldiers should continue to be the guarantors of the countrys security, at the cost to the United States of additional billions every year and American lives.

Afghans will decide what to do, with or without an American troop presence.

Perhaps the argument is instead that an American military presence is necessary to support a reconciliation process in Afghanistan. But then the question becomes why, after 20 years, Afghanistans political leaders still cannot find common ground to unite against the Taliban, a force most Afghans abhor. An indefinite U.S. military presence will not bring that unity about if, in this existential moment, and a year after the United States signaled it would leave in 2021, Kabul is still riven with political differences. Afghans will decide what to do, with or without an American troop presence.

Finally, some argue that the United States has an obligation to protect Afghanistans social and democratic gains. But the United States has already invested more than $40 billion in development assistance to Afghanistan in addition to the more than $800 billion spent supporting the U.S. military effort in the conflict. The United States could make nation-building and humanitarian commitments on this scale in other parts of the world, some much closer to the United Statesbut it does not, because such investment is unsustainable over the long term. Development assistance to Afghanistan can continue, but with better management to prevent the fraud, waste, and mismanagement that have cost the United States more than $19 billion since 2009.

I am not writing as a neutral observer: I was the U.S. ambassador in Kabul from 2014 to 2016 and senior adviser to the secretary of state when the decisions were made in 201819 to negotiate with the Taliban. I know that the return of the Taliban outside the constraints of a successful peace process would spell disaster for Afghan women, education, and the country as a whole. I know the future is uncertain.

I also know that 20 years of our combat engagement have not brought about a military resolution in Afghanistan, and ten more are unlikely to. Washington should be under no illusions: should American troops stay, they will be targeted, and so will the broader U.S. diplomatic presence. Those who now criticize the presidents decision to leave would instead be asking why he chose to remainas they have done when U.S. casualties increased in the past. The United States also cannot impose a political agreement on Afghanistan, no matter how many analysts suggest that it can. Washington has failed to prevent regional countries from acting as spoilers, something they will continue to do.

President Bidens decision, however, is not an either/or proposition.The United States does not have to walk away from Afghanistan because it withdraws its forces. Washington can still play a central role in supporting a peaceful resolution in Afghanistan by working with the countries that are engaged in backing the talks. There is even an argument to be made that the announced withdrawal could lead to greater unity of effort among Afghan political leaders in Kabul.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Afghanistan on April 15 and reaffirmed the U.S. security partnership with Kabul. Military withdrawal should not stop the United States and its partners from assisting Afghanistans security forces and supporting its development, with a special emphasis on protecting the gains that women and girls have made over the past 20 years. Moreover, it should be possible for the United States to increase the level of its developmental aid, which the previous administration actually reduced at the Afghanistan donor conference in November 2020. The United States can continue to work regionally on countering terrorism and other potential threats. Not a single regional government, including Iran, is interested in seeing Afghanistan collapse or leaving the door open to al Qaeda. Afghanistans neighbors and even our adversaries have a strong stake in the countrys stability.

Sacrificing more American lives, howeverwhich is what a continued military presence would meanseems the wrong thing to do. As a coalition of veterans organizations recently wrote to the president, we should not be asking our women and men in uniform to remain entangled in a conflict with no clear military mission or path to victory. As I attended ceremonies for fallen American and coalition troops during my years in Kabul, and the Taliban continued to make gains on the battlefield, it was difficult not to share that sentiment.

There will be debate on the time frame the president has proposed, but the clock has run out on extended military engagement. The prior Republican administration acknowledged this reality when it set a May 1 deadline for complete withdrawal. The United States must now take on the other, more pressing national and international concerns that are on a scale not seen since 1945. Yesterdays conflictsand yesterdays optics on what constitutes a security threatdo not help the country move forward. Americas future, wherever it leads, is not in continuing the forever wars.

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Biden Made the Right Decision on Afghanistan - Foreign Affairs Magazine