Aswathe of South Asia is in dire crisis. The 20-year mission of the United States of America in Afghanistan collapsed on a single day with the Taliban sweeping into Kabul to seize control of the country. President Ashraf Ghani has fled the embattled nation, and the US has abandoned its embassy.
In the net, Afghanistan neither has a government nor American representation, which is perhaps the worst of both worlds.
In deeply humiliating scenes for the Biden administration, less than a month before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, smoke spiralled from the embassy compound as staff hastily destroyed documents, before a final group took down the stars-and-stripes flag and headed to the airport by military helicopter.
Having scored a seemingly spectacular victory ~ a testament to the inherent fragility of Afghan forces ~ the Taliban will now have to countenance the formidable task of ruling. It is generally expected to proclaim a new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan soon.
This will indubitably entail a paradigm shift in governance, with a pronounced theocratic emphasis. Not many have faith in the promises made by the former insurgents of an amnesty for old enemies and those, like women’s rights activists, who sought a different future for Afghanistan. The airport was mobbed with thousands of people desperate to escape.
In the evening they flooded on to the runway, halting all air traffic. It is the overwhelming anxiety to flee the country that heightens the gravity of the crisis. Even the militants were surprised by the speed of the takeover, co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar admitted in a video statement. A substantially deserted country will be a mute testament to the tragedy.
It was clear from early Sunday that a second era of Taliban rule had effectively begun. Its commanders started the day so confident of victory that after their fighters surrounded the capital, they ordered them to stay outside the city and wait.
“Our forces are not entering Kabul city. We want a peaceful transfer of power,” said spokesman Suhail Shaheen. But with surrender apparently inevitable, Afghan government forces melted away, looting broke out, and hours later the Taliban claimed their men were needed to restore order. They moved in not as fighters but as policemen, presenting themselves as a government in waiting.
By evening the Taliban had seized the “Arg”, the presidential palace that is Afghanistan’s historic seat of power. The renewed Islamic Emirate, more than two decades after the group had established the first one, has filled rights-loving people around the world with despair and even anger. But the anger was provoked as much by the West’s abandonment of the war-ravaged country as it was by fears of what the Taliban will do in the coming weeks and months.
By evening, former President Ashraf Ghani was reportedly in Tajikistan. In a post on Facebook, he acknowledged the Taliban’s military victory, and said he left to avoid fighting in Kabul that would have caused a “flood of bloodshed”. “The Taliban have won with the judgment of their swords and guns, and are now responsible for the honour, property and self-preservation of their countrymen,” Ghani wrote. An era has ended and another has begun.