[A takeover of the entire country was all but absolute as the Afghan government collapsed and the U.S. rushed through a frenzied evacuation.]
President Ashraf Ghani of
Afghanistan fled the country, and a council of Afghan officials, including
former President Hamid Karzai, said they would open negotiations with the
Taliban over the shape of the insurgency’s takeover. By day’s end, the
insurgents had all but officially sealed their control of the entire country.
The speed and violence of the
Taliban sweep through the countryside and cities the previous week caught the
American military and government flat-footed. Hastily arranged American
military helicopter flights evacuated the sprawling American Embassy compound
in Kabul, ferrying American diplomats and Afghan Embassy workers to the Kabul
military airport. At the civilian airport next door, Afghans wept as they
begged airline workers to put their families on outbound commercial flights
even as most were grounded in favor of military aircraft.
Amid occasional bursts of gunfire,
the whump of American Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters overhead drowned out
the thrum of traffic as the frenzied evacuation effort unfolded. Below, Kabul’s
streets were jammed with vehicles as panic set off a race to leave the city.
Two decades after American troops
invaded Afghanistan to root out Qaeda terrorists who attacked on Sept. 11,
2001, the American nation-building experiment was in ruins — undercut by
misguided and often contradictory policies and by a relentless insurgency whose
staying power had been profoundly underestimated by U.S. military planners.
More than 2,400 American troops
gave their lives and thousands more were wounded in an effort to build a
democratic Afghan government. Tens of thousands of civilians died in the
fighting, and thousands more were displaced from their homes. In recent days
alone, thousands fled to Kabul as the Taliban advanced through other cities at
breakneck speed.
The toll of war fell heavily on
Afghan armed forces in recent years. But no amount of American training and
matériel — at a cost of $83
billion — was sufficient to create a security force willing to fight
and die for a besieged nation that American forces were leaving behind. Public
declarations by, first, President
Donald J. Trump and then President
Biden calling for a quick and total troop pullout sent morale
plummeting across Afghanistan.
In Washington, the speed of the
collapse took the Biden administration by surprise, officials said — and left
it with the realization that Mr. Biden will go down in history as the president
who presided over a humiliating final act in a long and bedeviled American
chapter in Afghanistan.
Now, Afghans suddenly face the
prospect of complete domination by the Taliban again. In areas the insurgents
have recently conquered, there is no sign they have turned away from the harsh
Islamist code and rule by intimidation that characterized their government in
the 1990s.
In the center of Kabul, people
began painting over advertisements and posters of women at beauty salons,
already fearing the return of the Taliban’s traditional bans against images of
humans and against women appearing in public unveiled.
Inside the vacated presidential
palace, Al Jazeera broadcast what the network described as a news briefing
delivered by Taliban commanders flanked by fighters with assault weapons. The
network quoted the fighters as saying they were working to secure Kabul so that
leaders in Qatar and outside the capital could return safely.
At 6:30 p.m., the Taliban issued a
statement that their forces were moving into police districts in order to
maintain security in areas that had been abandoned by the government security
forces. Zabiullah Mujahid, spokesman for the Taliban, posted the statement on
his Twitter feed.
“The Islamic Emirate ordered its
forces to enter the areas of Kabul city from which the enemy has left because
there is risk of theft and robbery,” the statement said, using the Taliban’s
name for their government. Taliban members had been ordered not to harm
civilians or enter individual homes, it added. “Our forces are entering Kabul
city with all caution.”
As darkness fell over Kabul, the
United States Embassy warned Americans still in Kabul to shelter in place
rather than trying to reach the airport. Witnesses at the civilian domestic
terminal said they were hearing occasional gunshots nearby. Thousands of people
had crammed into the terminal and filled the parking lots, desperately seeking
flights out.
Inside the walled Green Zone in
central Kabul, armored cars packed with diplomats, aid workers and private
security contractors rushed to the American military command’s fortified
compound near the embassy to be airlifted to Hamid Karzai International
Airport. Others flocked to the Serena Hotel, a tightly secured hotel popular
among foreigners.
As American and NATO troops began
withdrawing in May, Afghan security forces swiftly collapsed, often
surrendering without firing a shot. Many accepted Taliban offers of safe
passage and cash, often relayed by village elders, and abandoned weapons and
equipment confiscated by the Taliban.
“The inability of Afghan security
forces to defend their country has played a very powerful role in what we’ve
seen over the last few weeks,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
The American Embassy, the epicenter
of American nation-building efforts, was shuttered by the end of the day on
Sunday after sensitive documents had been shredded or burned, officials said.
The American flag was lowered and transferred to the military airport staging
area.
At the former NATO Resolute Support
landing zone near the U.S. Embassy compound, the deafening sound of helicopter
after helicopter taking people out of the Green Zone reverberated across the
small airfield.
The landing zone tarmac was packed
with a constellation of uniforms from different nations. Contractors, diplomats
and civilians were all trying to catch flights out. The United Nations
Assistance Mission in Afghanistan moved its offices to the airport.
As helicopters landed one after another,
military personnel handed out matchbox-size cardboard boxes with ear plugs and
corralled people onto the choppers. Those who were eligible to fly were given
special bracelets denoting their status as noncombatants.
But for millions of Afghans, including
tens of thousands who assisted the U.S. efforts in the country for years, there
were no bracelets. They were marooned in the city.
These were the scenes the Biden
administration had hoped to avoid for fear of evoking comparisons to the
desperate helicopter airlift of Americans and Vietnamese allies from a rooftop
in Saigon as the city fell to North Vietnamese troops in April 1975.
Kabul’s streets were clogged to a
standstill by cars and taxis loaded with luggage and personal items as
thousands of Afghans raced to the airport. Some passengers abandoned their
vehicles and trudged by foot, lugging their baggage through the rutted streets.
Bank guards fired into the air to
scatter throngs of Afghans trying to withdraw cash from a branch that had shut
down in central Kabul. Most shops were shuttered, cutting Afghans off from food
and other supplies. Families crammed personal mementos and clothing into
suitcases, then abandoned their homes as they pleaded and offered bribes to
secure flights out of the city.
Some police officers stripped off
their uniforms and melted into the civilian population. A New York Times
journalist saw several policemen surrender to Taliban fighters. At Abdul Haq
Square in the center of the capital, five men who appeared to be Taliban
fighters gathered as cars drove by showing their support for the militants.
In a Twitter post addressed “Dear
countrymen,” Mr. Ghani said he made the “hard choice” to leave Afghanistan in
order to prevent bloodshed. He called on the Taliban to “protect the name and
honor of Afghanistan.”
Mr. Ghani left in a plane for
Uzbekistan with his wife, Rula Ghani, and two close aides, according to a
member of the Afghan delegation in Doha, Qatar, that has been in peace
negotiations with the Taliban since last year. The official asked not to
identified speaking about the president’s movements.
Abdullah Abdullah, a bitter rival
of Mr. Ghani who competed against him in the last two presidential elections,
condemned Mr. Ghani for abandoning his countrymen at a moment of crisis. “God
will call him to account, and the people of Afghanistan will make their judgment,”
Mr. Abdullah, chairman of the Afghan delegation to peace talks in Qatar, said
in a Facebook video.
Amid fears that the Taliban would
shut down the independent news media in Kabul, as they have in other cities,
local news outlets reported that the Taliban had invited them to broadcast the
takeover of the presidential palace compound.
With rumors rife and reliable
information hard to come by, the streets were filled with scenes of panic and
desperation.
“Greetings, the Taliban have
reached the city. We are escaping,” said Sahraa Karimi, the head of Afghan
Film, in a post shared widely on Facebook. Filming herself
as she fled on foot, out of breath and clutching at her head scarf, she shouted
at others to escape while they could.
Early in the day, senior Afghan
politicians were seen boarding planes at Kabul airport. Bagram Air Base was
captured by Taliban forces midday on Sunday, as was the provincial town of
Khost in eastern Afghanistan, according to Afghan news media reports.
The fall of two of Afghanistan’s
most important cities — Mazar-i-Sharif
in the north late Saturday and Jalalabad in the east on Sunday — would
have been shocking a week ago, but both events were overshadowed Sunday by the
panicked collapse of the government in Kabul.
On the city’s western reaches, a
young man waving a white Taliban flag was directing traffic as crowds gathered
to watch the spectacle. At least one Kabul police district was seen being
captured by the militants.
And as the sun set behind the
mountains, more Taliban fighters roared into the city on motorbikes, in police
pickups and in one American-made Humvee seized from Afghan security forces. On
top of a massive Coca-Cola billboard in the middle of a roundabout, the white
Taliban flag fluttered in the dusk.
As buildings that once housed
diplomats and large international organizations emptied, a group of
plainclothes Afghan police officers wandering the Green Zone saw an
opportunity. They knocked on the doors at one compound and asked an Afghan man
there if the place was empty — it was their time to loot, the police officer
told him.
It was only eight days ago that a
remote provincial capital, Zaranj,
in the far west, became the first to fall to the Taliban. Since then,
one provincial capital after another has collapsed as the American-trained
Afghan security forces surrendered, deserted or simply stripped off their
uniforms and fled. Taliban videos showed militants driving American Humvees and
waving M-16 rifles in the conquered cities.
At the Kabul airport on Sunday, two
Marines standing on the tarmac acknowledged that they were living a moment of
history. A little earlier, they said, they saw someone exit a helicopter while
cradling a poorly folded American flag: It had just been lowered from the
shuttered embassy compound.
Reporting was contributed by
Carlotta Gall, David E. Sanger, Lara Jakes and other employees of The New York
Times.
David Zucchino is a contributing
writer for The New York Times. @davidzucchino