By Friday night, when the first American units began to arrive to secure the airport to evacuate the bulk of U.S. diplomatic personnel, the mood in Kabul was mostly of resignation that the nation’s capital, like so many provincial cities, would soon come under the Taliban’s sway, too.
“Kabul will fall sooner or later because the morale of security forces is so weak. The government doesn’t really support them,” said Staff. Sgt. Khaluddin, one of the Afghan soldiers defending Kabul. He was on leave in his hometown of Kunduz when it was overrun by insurgents this past week. He managed to escape with family members to Kabul on a moto-rickshaw and resumed service in his Kabul-based unit.
The advance of the Taliban forces poses a significant foreign-policy challenge to President Biden, some four months after he said that all U.S. forces would leave Afghanistan by Sept. 11, implementing agreements that the Trump administration struck with the Taliban in Doha in February 2020. The Taliban launched their offensive soon after Mr. Biden’s announcement.
Mr. Biden, who started out Friday at his home in Wilmington, Del., and then traveled to Camp David, received a briefing on the drawdown of the U.S. civilian presence in Afghanistan, the White House said.
The president said earlier this week that, after so much American support in the two decades since the post-9/11 attack on Afghanistan, the nation’s leadership and people now must summon the will to fight. The administration has pledged to maintain a high-level of diplomatic, development and other assistance and some military support to the Afghan government, throughout the pullout and afterward. But the quick drawdown this summer deprived the Afghan military of the crucial airstrikes, maintenance and other support it needed to fight, according to former officials and foreign-policy specialists.
“The Afghan military was designed to have a very strong plug-in of U.S. firepower,” said retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a national security adviser to former President Donald Trump who previously served as a deputy to the commander of the NATO-led force in Afghanistan. “Without that, they’re in trouble.”
The arrival of U.S. troops —some of whom flew in Black Hawk helicopters, shooting flares over Kabul’s diplomatic quarter Friday afternoon—shifted the focus firmly on the dismantling of the large international presence that dominated the Afghan capital during the past two decades.
The U.S. and other Western embassies, which have already urged their citizens to leave Afghanistan immediately, began the process of drastically scaling down their presence. That has left thousands of Afghans who fear for their lives under the Taliban scrambling to find ways to leave the country at the time when one foreign mission after another stopped accepting visa requests.
As those lucky enough to have a way out crowded Kabul’s airport, tens of thousands of other Afghans streamed into the capital from the provinces, seeking shelter in city parks and in mosques.
“The Taliban don’t care about people, they just like war, and now you see the city filling up with displaced people,” said Yama Rashid, a 29-year-old seller of mobile-phone cards. “They say that the U.S. is going to help people who worked for them. But what about the rest of us? Should we just burn?”
For the Taliban, the biggest triumph in the war so far was Friday’s seizure of Kandahar, which is where Taliban founder Mullah Omar donned the cloak of Prophet Muhammad and proclaimed himself the commander of the faithful in 1996, conquering most of the country soon after.
Pashtana Durrani, a female university student who runs an education organization, said she had to leave all her possessions behind as she escaped Kandahar on Friday.
“The city was taken with no resistance. There was celebratory fire, and people are also so scared,” she said. “We’ve left behind all the books that my father and grandfather had given me, every memory, and we’ve had to burn all our pictures.”
Many other Kandaharis, however, reacted with joy. Hundreds of locals took their motorbikes to the streets now that the Afghan government’s ban on them, imposed to deter the Taliban, no longer applied. Shops and markets were opened, residents said.
“Now the situation is totally normal,” said Syed Mohammad, a Kandahar shopkeeper. “On each square there are 10 to 15 Taliban standing with guns, flags and walkie talkies. But everyone can go to any part of the city without constraint.”
The Taliban’s new governor for Kandahar, Haji Yousaf Wafa, issued a message announcing a general amnesty for government employees and members of security forces, and urged everyone to return to work as normal, including in schools and universities. In a radio announcement, the Taliban also asked traffic police officers to resume their duties and alleviate Kandahar’s traffic jams.
Despite promises of amnesty, the city’s new rulers raided the homes of several anti-Taliban commanders and former security officials, particularly those close to Gen. Abdul Raziq, the Kandahar police chief and warlord who was assassinated by the Taliban in 2018, residents said. Footage shot around the Kandahar prison, which used to house Taliban detainees, showed bodies of several police officers strewn in the field.
Kandahar and nearby Helmand, whose provincial capital Lashkar Gah also fell Friday, were the main focus of the U.S. military surge in 2010-14, accounting for a large part of the 2,450 American military deaths in the country. On Friday, the Taliban also entered Pul-e-Alam, the capital of Mr. Ghani’s home province of Logar, just south of Kabul, and captured its governor and several other senior officials. The only big cities that the Afghan government still holds besides Kabul are Jalalabad in the country’s east and the northern hub of Mazar-e-Sharif, which is surrounded by the Taliban.
Some of the provinces that have fallen to the Taliban over the past week were surrendered in negotiated deals, as happened Thursday in Ghazni, whose governor was subsequently arrested by Kabul. In the western city of Herat, however, commando troops and a militia led by warlord Ismail Khan initially put up stiff resistance. That resistance collapsed Thursday night, and Mr. Khan and top provincial security officials were taken into custody by the insurgents.
Photos released by the Taliban on social media showed Mr. Khan—a checkered turban above his gray beard, an ammunition rack on his chest—sitting on a blue plastic chair, with barriers usually used to secure military bases in the background. The Taliban’s spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said in a statement that Mr. Khan, thousands of his men, the governor of Herat and other senior officials had switched sides and joined the Taliban. In a short video interview released on social media, a dazed Mr. Khan—who was a Taliban prisoner in the 1990s -- said he hadn’t prepared for the city’s sudden collapse. He said his message to Afghan government forces was that “we have to finish this war and have a peaceful life.”
The scenes of triumphant Taliban fighters conquering city after city, parading their Humvees, artillery pieces and U.S.-made drones, have unnerved many of America’s allies. In an unusual criticism of America’s rush out of Afghanistan., U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace described the Doha agreement in a Sky News interview as “a rotten deal” that “effectively told a Taliban that wasn’t winning that they were winning.”
“We will all, in the international community, probably pay the consequences of that,” he added.
