Afghan president Ashraf Ghani flees country as capital falls to insurgents – as it happened

With the collapse of Mazar, the only significant city outside of Kabul that had not yet fallen to the Taliban was eastern Jalalabad.

Now, we are seeing credible reports via Al Jazeera that the Taliban has announced the entry of its militants into Jalalabad, which leaves Kabul surrounded:

From Australian journalist and seven-year army veteran Kate Banville:

A report from Kabul on what the evacuations are like for westerners in la Repubblica (translated from Italian):

Embassies close, they leave the country. US citizens receive airlift emails - go to the airport now or we won’t be able to help you anymore. Same for Canadians. Then it’s up to us, the Italians: ‘We inform you that, given the serious deterioration in security conditions, an air force flight will be made available tomorrow, August 15’.

The embassy suspends work: only the consul will remain in Kabul, to assist the translators who for years have helped the Italian soldiers in Afghanistan, to whom Italy has guaranteed assistance to leave the country.

All others who want it - diplomats, humanitarian personnel, journalists - will be evacuated by military flight from Hamid Karzai airport, now controlled by the Turks, who have deployed troops after the withdrawal of NATO.

More on the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, from AP:

The fall of the country’s fourth largest city, which Afghan forces and two powerful former warlords had pledged to defend, hands the insurgents control over all of northern Afghanistan, confining the Western-backed government to the centre and east.

Abas Ebrahimzada, a lawmaker from the Balkh province where the city is located, said the national army surrendered first, which prompted pro-government militias and other forces to lose morale and give up in the face of a Taliban onslaught launched earlier Saturday.

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Ebrahimzada said Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ata Mohammad Noor, former warlords who command thousands of fighters, had fled the province and their whereabouts were unknown.

Noor said in a Facebook post that his defeat in Mazar-e-Sharif was orchestrated and blamed the government forces, saying they handed their weapons and equipment to the Taliban. He did not say who was behind the conspiracy, nor offer details, but said he and Dostum “are in a safe place now”

The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson, who reported from Afghanistan in the early 2000s:

There is a conceit that today’s Taliban is different from the Taliban of 2001. This is certainly an idea that some senior Taliban officials have sought to propagate in recent years. Facts on the ground suggest otherwise. They claim to have moved on from their old alliance with Al Qaeda, for instance, but over the years they have partnered with other jihadist groups operating, as they have done, out of sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan, such as the Haqqani network, which is responsible for scores of suicide bombings and so-called complex attacks—involving gunmen and suicide bombers acting in tandem—and for causing hundreds of civilian deaths.

The Taliban have rendered Afghanistan unworkable as a country; unworkable, that is, without them. And the truth is that they were never really beaten. They merely did what guerrillas do in order to survive: they melted away in the face of overwhelming force, regrouped and restored themselves to fighting strength, and returned to battle. Here they are.

15 Aug 202121.19 EDT

David Smith

The words of political leaders can come back to haunt them. “None whatsoever, zero,” Joe Biden said last month when asked if he saw any parallels between the US withdrawals from Vietnam and Afghanistan.

“The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of the embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

The dispatch of 3,000 extra US troops to help evacuate embassy staff looks like a pre-emptive move to avoid such a humiliating spectacle. Even so, with the Taliban on the march and closing in on Kabul, it did not stop cable news networks on Friday replaying grainy images from Vietnam nor the rightwing New York Post running the front page headline “Biden’s Saigon”.

A blame game away is under way for an issue that defies finger pointing, simple headlines or strident certainty perhaps more than any other. Biden is only the latest American president to stumble into a hall of mirrors where every argument has a counter-argument, every action has a reaction, no escape route is offered and the only guarantee is that Afghan civilians will lose:

Queues at the passport office in Kabul yesterday:

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From Sangar Paykhar, who was born in Afghanistan:

The UN’s refugee agency provided this update on Friday. What is particularly worrying about Kabul at the moment is that it is where so many people (120,000 from rural areas) fled to seeking safety in recent months:

Some 80% of nearly a quarter of a million Afghans forced to flee since the end of May are women and children.

Nearly 400,000 were forced from their homes since the beginning of the year, joining 2.9 million Afghans already internally displaced across the country at the end of 2020.

Ongoing fighting has been reported in 33 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.

The overwhelming majority of Afghans forced to flee remain within the country, as close to their homes as fighting will allow. Since the beginning of this year, nearly 120,000 Afghans have fled from rural areas and provincial towns to Kabul province.

The sun will begin rising shortly over Kabul (which has been blacked out for the last few hours) and we should start to get a clearer picture of where things stand.