The operation began not with an assault on the city but with a foothold in the desert a hundred miles to its south. On October 19, 2001, Rangers from the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment parachuted from MC-130 aircraft toward a desert landing strip codenamed Objective Rhino. Seven hundred fifty soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division followed to establish Camp Rhino as a forward operating base. Before the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit arrived on November 25, a reconnaissance team from SEAL Team 8 scouted the area -- and was mistakenly engaged by AH-1W Cobra attack helicopters from the incoming Marine force. The SEALs managed to radio a message before anyone was hit. It was that kind of war: improvised, chaotic, and dependent on communication that sometimes worked and sometimes did not. By November 27, the 15th MEU had been joined by a unit of the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, and joint operations against Taliban forces in the Kandahar region were underway.

The fall of Kandahar was a pincer operation executed by two Afghan commanders who did not always coordinate with each other. From the south came Gul Agha Sherzai, contacted by a U.S. Army Special Forces team on November 18. His force of about 800 men was outnumbered and poorly equipped, but after receiving American supplies they moved out on November 22 in a convoy of over a hundred vehicles, pushing through the Arghastan desert. When the convoy halted outside the Taliban-held town of Takht-e-pol to negotiate a surrender, it was ambushed. American air support broke the attack, and the Taliban abandoned the area. From the north came Hamid Karzai, who had spent weeks in Tarin Kowt after the battle there, recruiting fighters until his force also numbered roughly 800. On November 30, Karzai began advancing toward Kandahar, taking the town of Petaw without resistance before running into stiff opposition at the bridge of Sayd Alim Kalay.

The bridge at Sayd Alim Kalay held Karzai's forces for two days under heavy Taliban resistance. American airstrikes finally forced the Taliban to withdraw on December 4, leaving the bridge intact, and Karzai's men seized a bridgehead on the far side. The next day brought a grim accident: a stray American bomb landed on an American position, killing three Special Forces soldiers and wounding Karzai himself. Despite the casualties, Karzai's forces held their ground, and from that precarious position he began negotiating with the Taliban for the surrender of Kandahar. The talks produced results before the military operation could. On December 7, when Sherzai's men launched their assault on Kandahar's airport, they met little resistance -- and discovered the Taliban had already surrendered the city to Karzai. Sherzai entered the city and was declared governor. Karzai, who had already been named Chairman of the Afghan Interim Administration, would not formally take office until December 22. By December 9, coalition forces had fully secured Kandahar.

The al-Qaeda fighters in Kandahar, led by Saif al-Adel and consisting largely of Arab mujahideen, managed to retreat from the city and escape across the border into Pakistan. It was a pattern that would repeat throughout the war -- military victories that failed to capture the enemy networks sustaining the insurgency. The fall of Kandahar was declared the end of organized Taliban control of Afghanistan. For a moment in December 2001, that statement felt true. Hamid Karzai went from militia commander to interim president, Sherzai became the strongman of Kandahar, and the Taliban appeared broken. But Kandahar's story was far from finished. Over the next two decades, the city would be repeatedly attacked. Suicide bombings, targeted assassinations, and pitched battles became routine. In the summer of 2021, the Taliban launched a major offensive and, after fighting from July through August, recaptured the city their movement had been born in. The circle closed exactly where it had opened.