Afghans living under Taliban rule

The Taliban swept into Kabul unopposed on Sunday and have seized the presidential palace with reports that Afghan president Ashraf Ghani has fled the country to Uzbekistan.

More than 60 countries have issued a joint statement calling on the Taliban to allow people to leave.

The US embassy says all it embassy staff have been evacuated to the airport.

Taliban officials said that the situation inside Afghanistan is peaceful with no clashes reported across the country on the day after the militants took over the capital Kabul.

Several people are reported killed at Kabul airport as Afghans try to flee.

Afghan collapse to Taliban reflects not just intelligence and military failure but the failure in 20 year to have built a more functional state. President Joe Biden’s miscalculation would haunt him, on former president Donald Trump who announced US troops would leave Afghanistan by 2021 provided the Taliban met the terms of the peace accord signed last year, as history repeat itself. Pictures of helicopters lifting off from the US embassy recalled the humiliating fall of Saigon in1975, with US and of the community of democracies credibility lost. This is a tragedy for Afghanistan and betrayal of the thousands of US and allied troops – and more than 120, 000 Afghans – who  died in the past 20 years of war.

President George W Bush invoked the Marshall plan when pledging to reconstruct Afghanistan in 2002, the US now has spent a trillion US dollars on its campaign, and devoted time and money to training and equipping the military, a force whose strategy to contain the Taliban depended on US backing with air support. Corruption and dysfunctional management badly hampered efforts of state-building. The restoration of Taliban rule which could be bloody and repressive, as waves of refugees fleeing Afghanistan has already started, with high risk of Afghanistan being base for jihadis.