YIKUS Issue Brief No. 150 Bong Young Sik (Research Fellow, Institute for Unification Studies, Yonsei University) At 11:59 p.m. local time on August 30, 2021, the last U.S. C-17 transport aircraft departed from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. With this, the United States officially ended the longest war in its history—the Afghanistan War—in accordance with President Joe Biden's full withdrawal deadline announced on July 8, 2021. The Afghanistan War, w