The cars, minibuses and armoured vehicles that the CIA used to run its shadow war in Afghanistan had been lined up and incinerated beyond identification before the Americans left. Below their ashy grey remains, pools of molten metal had solidified into permanent shiny puddles as the blaze cooled.
The faux Afghan village where they trained paramilitary forces linked to some of the worst human rights abuses of the war had been brought down on itself. Only a high concrete wall still loomed over the crumpled piles of mud and beams, once used to practise for the widely hated night raids on civilian homes.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has said the United States government will “sooner or later” have to recognise the Taliban, which now rules Afghanistan.
In a televised interview with the Turkish-state affiliated TRT World, Khan said on Saturday the US is in a state of “shock and confusion” after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan on August 15.
While the economy teeters on the brink of collapse, vendors at an opium market in southern Afghanistan say prices for their goods have skyrocketed since the Taliban takeover.
Plunging his knife into a large plastic bag filled with four kilograms (nine pounds) of what looks like brown mud, Amanullah, who asked to use a fake name, extracts a lump and places it in a small cup suspended over a primus flame.
In the midst of the point-scoring and blame-shifting on display in the senators’ questions to the nation’s military leadership, it was clear that it was a contest to apportion shares in failure.
And behind the debacle of the pullout that left tens of thousands of vulnerable Afghans behind, there were fleeting references to the far deeper failure of the preceding two decades – a reckoning that has only just begun for the Pentagon and the US foreign policy establishment.
One digit on a single piece of paper separated Zee and his family from an uncertain fate. A month ago, the former Afghan interpreter escaped Kandahar, Afghanistan where the Taliban seized his home. They were looking for him, according to his brother who later sent him a video of several men loitering around his backyard. Zee dressed his family in worn and dirty clothes, hoping to disguise them as beggars, then boarded a bus with 50 other escapees at midnight. The bus headed toward Kabul and stopped six or seven times at Taliban checkpoints along the way. Zee said that armed men entered the bus and questioned the occupants: “What do you do? What was your job?” He sunk back into the seat with his family, hoping the disguises helped. No one questioned them.
Gen Frank McKenzie, the head of central command, told the House armed services committee that once the US troop presence was pushed below 2,500 as part of President Joe Biden’s decision in April to complete a total withdrawal by September, the unraveling of the US-backed Afghan government accelerated.
The Taliban on Thursday violently cracked down on a small women’s rights demonstration, firing shots into the air and pushing back protesters, AFP journalists witnessed.
A group of six women gathered outside a high school in eastern Kabul demanding the right for girls to return to secondary school, after the hardline Islamist group excluded them from classes earlier this month.
One of Afghanistan’s most prominent psychiatrists has been abducted on his way home from work by a group of armed men.
Dr Nader Alemi, 66, who opened the country’s first private psychiatric hospital in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, was stopped by seven men in a white car last week, said his family.
Before the Taliban took power in Afghanistan last month, there were numerous influential social media users in the country who were strong opponents of the group’s policies.
But since 15 August, Afghans have been deleting photos and tweets from their past – and many have turned away from social media altogether for fear of being targeted by Taliban forces.
A photojournalist recalls the Afghans he photographed, including the leader of a local police unit left to fight the Taliban alone when American soldiers left. A few days later, the police commander was dead.
