Kabul fell faster than the Americans and their allies ever imagined. On Sunday morning, Taliban negotiators entered the city around 10:00 a.m. to discuss what the acting interior minister called a “peaceful transfer.” By nightfall, the insurgents’ white flag flew over the Arg Palace. President Ashraf Ghani had already fled the country. The two-decade-old US-backed republic was over.
The speed of the collapse is what will be studied for years. A senior western security official told Reuters: “We mapped a 30-day timeline for Kabul to be isolated. They did it in 30 hours.” That is not a miscalculation. That is a complete failure of intelligence, strategy, and political will.
The Taliban did not win this war in a single battle. They won it province by province, city by city, during a week-long nationwide offensive. Kandahar and Herat fell on 12 August. Mazar-i-Sharif went the next morning. Jalalabad fell on the 14th. In each place, provincial governors negotiated surrender deals. Government forces simply melted away. They did not fight. They did not hold ground. They disappeared.
By dawn on Sunday, only Kabul’s outer ring of checkpoints remained. The president departed before any agreement was signed. The acting interior minister initially promised a transitional government. That promise lasted hours. By dusk, the Taliban were posting victory photos from the desk Ghani had used earlier that day. They declared the “war is over.”
What happens next is the question no one can answer with certainty. The Taliban have not changed their ideology. They have changed their tactics. They walked unopposed into the presidential palace, but they did not walk unopposed into the international community’s good graces. American diplomats retreated to the military side of Hamid Karzai International Airport. That airport is now the last piece of US-controlled ground in the country.
Chaos consumed the civilian side of the airport by Monday morning. Afghans clutching visas, children, and even family goats rushed the tarmac. Several clung to a US Air Force C-17 as it taxied, then fell to their deaths moments after take-off. All commercial carriers suspended service when Afghan aviation authorities lost control of the airspace. The evacuation is not a plan. It is a desperate scramble.
The forces that drove this collapse were years in the making. The US-backed republic was always fragile. It depended on American military support and Afghan political will. When the US announced its withdrawal, the political will evaporated. Provincial governors saw which way the wind was blowing. They cut deals. The Taliban offered terms. The government offered nothing but a president who fled.
Kabul was the last major city still outside militant hands. It did not fall in a siege. It did not fall in a bloody street fight. It fell because the people who were supposed to defend it decided not to. The Afghan security forces, trained and equipped by the US for two decades, did not fight. They melted away, just as they did in every other province.
The Taliban now control the country. They have the presidential palace. They have the victory photos. They have the white flag flying over the Arg. But they do not have the international recognition they want. They do not have the aid money the country needs. And they do not have a plan for governing a nation of 38 million people, many of whom remember the brutal rule they imposed in the 1990s.
The war is over. The consequences are just beginning.
