Triumph of the Taleban: the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan

There’s an apocryphal story, told and retold by journalists many times over the course of America’s longest war. A Taleban prisoner is sitting, relaxed, across the table from an American interrogator: ‘You may have all the watches,’ the prisoner says, ‘but we have all the time.’ Now, the Taleban’s patience is finally paying off. President Joe Biden has promised that the last US soldier will be out of Afghanistan by the heavily freighted date of 11 September. In fact, all the troops may be back on American soil by the even more symbolic date of 4 July. Other Nato soldiers — including a small British training mission — are hastily lowering their flags and scuttling out. They leave in their wake an unfolding disaster.

After 19 years, the Islamic Emirate — as the Taleban call themselves — are not waiting any longer. There is fighting across Afghanistan: not just in the south where the Taleban are traditionally strong, but in 28 out of 34 provinces. The Americans are already off the battlefield and only the ineffective Afghan security forces are left to stop the Taleban, who are surging forward everywhere. The United States lost some 2,300 people in almost two decades of the Afghan war. The Afghan army loses that many every few months. The government tries to stop the true, terrible casualty figures from getting out but the news agencies cobble together estimates. In the past week, some 200 Afghan police and troops were killed; the week before, 150 died in a single day.

The government and its supporters were dismayed by the death last week of a famous and charismatic special forces commander, Colonel Sohrab Azimi, who was killed along with all his men. They were overrun by the Taleban while defending an isolated base in the far north of the country.