 For more videos and people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. On April 14th, U.S. President Joe Biden announced that the U.S. along with NATO allies and operational partners will be withdrawing all the remaining troops from Afghanistan before September 11th. This year will be the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks and 20 years of direct U.S. presence in Afghanistan. The withdrawal of all foreign troops was part of a deal signed between the Donald Trump administration and the Taliban last year in February. Though the deal set May 1st, 2021 as the deadline for the withdrawal, the U.S. is most likely to miss it now. The U.S. Taliban deal signed last year had also imposed certain conditions on the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. The two main ones were intra-Afghan talks and non-cooperation of the Taliban with Al-Qaeda in ISIS. However, according to reports, Biden administration has decided to withdraw the troops anyway. The U.S., which had more than 100,000 troops in the country in 2011, has gradually reduced it to around 2500 troops due to the rising cost of the Afghanistan war. Most of the troops were withdrawn during Donald Trump's presidency. While Biden and other NATO countries have announced that they will be withdrawing troops, it does not mean an end to U.S. presence in the country. Reports have stated that the United States military will remain in Afghanistan in the form of special operations and CI personnel, along with manned attack aircrafts, drones, etc. Air strikes alone have caused a heavy number of casualties and destruction. According to figures released by the U.S. military, U.S. and its allies dropped 81,638 bombs and missiles on Afghanistan between the years 2001-2019. Data from 2019 to now has not been made public. Even these figures do not include several categories of air strikes, meaning the actual numbers are much higher. Moreover, only a fraction of the deaths and damage caused by these strikes is reported in the media. It is estimated, however, that at least 31,000 Afghan civilians have been killed in total in this war and 360,000 civilians have died due to indirect causes from the war. Redrawal of ground troops alone cannot signify the end of war in Afghanistan when such possibilities continue to exist. So what did the U.S. achieve in all these years that cost so many lives? The U.S. has failed to realize one of its main goals of destroying the Taliban. It is leaving the country after what is definitely a defeat. The Taliban, in fact, is stronger than it has ever been since 2001. U.S. had also stated that it will defeat drug trade by ending the circulation of opium and heroin from Afghanistan. But in the past five years, Afghanistan accounted for 84 percent of global opium production. Meanwhile, certain sections are demanding that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan must continue for the sake of the advances made in women's rights, such as education. The truth is, in pre-Taliban Afghanistan, half of university students, 40 percent of the country's doctors, 70 percent of its teachers, and 30 percent of its civil servants were women. Today, after 20 years of U.S. occupation, in half of the country's provinces, fewer than 20 percent of teachers are female. In many provinces, fewer than 10 percent are females. Only 37 percent of adolescent girls can read as compared to 66 percent of boys. More over 54.4 percent of Afghanistan's population lives below the poverty line. 98.2 percent of workers earn around 3.10 cents a day. Over two-thirds of the country's people lack access to clean drinking water, and the literacy rate is a dismal 38.2 percent. The presence of the U.S. has done nothing to help Afghanistan and its people. Now the withdrawal of the foreign troops is happening without any sort of peace process or structure in place for future governance, as talks between different parties have failed to reach any conclusion. Meer Rahman Rahmani, Speaker of the Lower House of the Afghan Parliament, has stated that this could mean a possibility of the return of civil war.