Kabul falls to the Taliban

Jim Huylebroek/NYT

Afghanistan: It is absolutely tragic. And, yet, I don't think we have anything left to give them, and President Biden has made the same calculation. Contrary to the popular narrative, I do believe we could have ‘won’ had we actually fought to win during the window of opportunity we had in the period of 2001-06-ish. For the past fifteen years it has all been futile. Politically correct warfare will never bring about victory or peace, and that is exactly why Afghanistan is right back where it started twenty years ago. End of story.

New York Times - Kabul's sudden fall to the Taliban ends U.S. era in Afghanistan

CNBC - Chaotic scenes at Kabul airport Afghans and foreign nationals flee Taliban

Washington Post - Afghan security forces’ wholesale collapse was years in the making. An except - 

'(A)ccording to documents obtained for the forthcoming Washington Post book “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” U.S. military officials privately harbored fundamental doubts for the duration of the war that the Afghan security forces could ever become competent or shed their dependency on U.S. money and firepower. “Thinking we could build the military that fast and that well was insane,” an unnamed former U.S. official told government interviewers in 2016.

Those fears, rarely expressed in public, were ultimately borne out by the sudden collapse this month of the Afghan security forces, whose wholesale and unconditional surrender to the Taliban will go down as perhaps the worst debacle in the history of proxy warfare. (Read more)

IANS - $88 billion spent on Afghan forces which surrendered without a fight to Taliban

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