All The President's Men (Part I)

The Fall of Kabul as Government Insiders Experienced it

Dear Subscribers, this piece is a little bit special. For the last two years I have been researching and writing a book on the fall of the Afghan republic. The book will, fingers crossed, come out next year. Though the three part article is not part of the book, what I present below is a preparatory study if you will, on the fall of Kabul vis-a-vis the republic according to government insiders who experienced it first hand. I hope you like it!

On 15th August 2021 Kabul fell to the Taliban. It took the whole world by surprise. The last president of the Afghan republic, Ashraf Ghani, had fled into exile. US Chinook helicopters flew out of the US embassy. Taliban militants in Sindhi hats and black turbans sat inside the Arg presidential palace and recited Quranic verses dealing with victory. Outside the palace images of chaos, of thousands of Afghans scrambling for the airport, were beamed across the world.

The fall of the city tarnished the benevolent self-image that the West liked to present to the world. Many people still remember the excessive coverage given to stray dogs in Afghanistan by Western media outlets and the relative indifference to the fate of millions of Afghans. Several years on, there are still many Afghans who are not accounted for - disappeared, tortured or killed. And still many remain in hiding or in exile. The fall of the capital seemed to signal the end of US hegemony in the country and the wider region.

Although Kabul fell in the full glare of the media, the plethora of narratives and misinformation often made it hard to understand this momentous event. The sudden and unexpected Taliban takeover gave birth to conspiracies, criticisms and the very foundational myths of a new Islamic emirate. The collapse was likened, depending on which side one was on, to the Prophet’s conquest of Mecca and to the US exit from Vietnam in 1973. However, none of these analogies helped to explain the collapse. Nor did it explain how foreseeable the collapse was and what it felt like to live through it.

Talking to players in the former president’s circle, we pieced together the events leading up to the collapse and what really happened. The roots of Kabul’s downfall, it seemed, were not rooted in military conquest, but rather in many other factors that were noticeable several years earlier. The cracks were there long before the city fell.