Next Up: Kabul ... Evacuation in Full Flight ... Shock and Awe

"Our aim remains to support the Afghan government and security forces."

"We maintain our diplomatic presence in Kabul and the security of our personnel is paramount."

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg

 

"There are no clashes taking place right now in Jalalabad because the governor has surrendered to the Taliban."

"Allowing passage to the Taliban was the only way to save civilian lives."

Jalalabad-based Afghan official

 

"The situation has all the hallmarks of a humanitarian catastrophe."

"[There are concerns relating to a] larger tide of hunger."

Thomson Phiri, UN World Food Program

 

"[The shocking lack of foresight in the Biden administration's exit strategy has sent the United States] hurtling toward an even worse sequel to the humiliating fall of Saigon in 1975."

U.S.Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell

"The city [Herat, population 600,000 in the west, which fell to the Taliban] looks like a frontline, a ghost town."

"Families have either left or are hiding in their homes."

Provincial council member Ghulam Habib Hashimi, Herat

An aircraft takes from the airport in Kabul as the Taliban closes in on the city. Photograph: Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images

It was inevitable that, in the absence of U.S. troops with the Biden administration's commitment to withdrawing American military personnel from Afghanistan, the Taliban was given the opportunity it awaited to consummate their end-plan of rushing, overwhelming and steam-rollering government security forces to reinstate themselves as the new government of Afghanistan by popular acclaim. In the face of provincial governors one after another offering no resistance to the entry of the Taliban in provincial capital cities, citing the priority of saving civilian lives, the Taliban proudly declared that the mass of the Afghan population welcomed their return as the proper governing body for the country.

The Taliban triumphant surge overwhelming the Afghan military and national police was predictable and most certainly expected. That the U.S. administration of President Joe Biden failed to recognize it beforehand and with that realization taking the opportunity to reprise their plan of exit for a more immediately responsive strategy which would allow them a partial withdrawal with a semi-permanent presence that might serve to protect both the government and the Afghan people and the U.S. itself from the looming inevitability of a firmly re-ensconced threat from terrorist groups stationed in Afghanistan again plotting against America just failed to penetrate the simple minds advising the president.

Taliban forces patrol a street in Herat, Afghanistan August 14, 2021. REUTERS/Stringer

This, the scenario that swiftly unfolded, leaving mouths agape at the White House leading to a confused response of returning thousands of U.S. soldiers to the city they had just recently departed from in a flurry of activity to escape the curse of Afghanistan that had consumed so much U.S. treasury and lives and time and effort, has left the world community with the unenviable vision of a U.S. administration in complete disarray, foiled in their planned escape and left once again holding hands with a corrupt government incapable of building consensus with the Northern Alliance Warlords who had once defeated the Taliban.

No one but the Taliban has come out of the situation in a better position than when they started. The U.S. besmirched itself to begin with,  negotiating with a terrorist group and in so doing legitimizing it as a future governing body in a country the U.S. was hoping to wash its hands of. But not really meaning to do so by delivering their allies into the hands so directly of the Islamist-ravaged-minds of the opponents both had fought so long, alongside NATO-member countries, all of whom are now desperately scrambling to remove their nationals from the country.

The Taliban, grim reapers of human life they so excel at, like all fundamentalist Islamists, played their hand openly enough, yet the U.S. negotiators under its special envoy, a man who with his own personal background would have recognized what the Taliban were planning, encountered no difficulty in persuading the Americans to leave Afghanistan and to take their allies with them. In plain negotiating talk, the Taliban insisted the foreigners must first leave before they would deign to sit at the negotiating table with the Afghan government. Their demand was acceded to, the expectation that they would negotiate in good faith with President Ashraf Ghani whom they now demand must step down, attests to their naivette.

 

Taliban forces patrol a street in Herat, Afghanistan August 14, 2021. REUTERS/Stringer

The provincial capitals continue to fall to the Taliban. Resistance is honourable, but proven futile. The defenders have a penchant for turning away from the advancing Taliban despite that their military mandate is to turn the terrorist invaders away from the cities they are so easily capturing. Their reputation for dispatching those members of the military whom they take in combat directly to their maker terrifies the Afghan national police and the military, just as the civilians are themselves fleeing in terror. Their defenders turn away from combat with the Taliban, and streams of refugees head for Kabul.

The final stronghold does not look as though it will hold. And knowing this, U.S. troops have been dispatched to evacuate the staff of the U.S. embassy numbering in their thousands. Is that possible? Both U.S. citizens and locally engaged Afghans. The U.K. has done the same, sending far fewer troops, as has Canada. Most embassies in the Afghan capital are retreating from the scene of what will soon become a large-scale butcher-shop. But President Biden is holding firm; he does not regret his decision to vacate the premises.

Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani and acting defence minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi visit military corps in Kabul, Afghanistan August 14, 2021. Afghan Presidential Palace/Handout via REUTERS