This is not the end of the war; it is merely the end of its direct American phase. The war began more than four decades ago, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and its first American phase, in the 1980s, featured indirect United States intervention on behalf of the anti-Soviet mujahideen. The war will assuredly last well beyond the American exit. There will be no power-sharing, no reconciliation, no peace of the brave. The war will grind on, with the edge going to the brutal fundamentalist warriors of the Taliban, who will torture and slaughter even as they repeal the advances made in women’s education and secularism in any form. But they will not have it all their own way. Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, India, and the Central Asian republics have their own stakes in this war, and not all of them want to see an outright Taliban victory. So they will fund clients and proxies, as will, in all likelihood, the United States. And the people of Afghanistan will continue to suffer. The American temptation to declare victory and walk away helped enable the rise of the Taliban after Soviet forces evacuated Afghanistan; the temptation to declare defeat and do the same may have similar consequences. Afghanistan will remain the cockpit of Great Power rivalries, as well as the home to a toxic and unrepentant Islamic fundamentalism that previously sheltered al-Qaeda, a movement that is not dead, and that may even gain some energy from this outcome.