While a recent US military review concluded that Logari’s plot was not preventable, the findings were less a vindication of America’s chaotic withdrawal than a reminder of how the US–Afghan relationship had broken down. As US forces withdrew, many Afghan government officials told me that they had warned their US counterparts about the threat of Islamic State – Khorasan Province (IS–KP), the Afghan branch of Isis. But it appears the US had stopped listening to their warnings; and in doing so, it helped to create the very conditions that led to the Abbey Gate attack.

One of the men who had warned them was Ahmad Zia Seraj, the General Director of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS). Once a revered spy chief targeted by the Taliban for assassination, Seraj, now a refugee waiting for his residency papers and teaching at King’s College London, cut a very different figure when we met in a London hotel at the end of last year.

Long before the US withdrawal, Seraj had been telling the American top brass about the threat of IS–KP, and is still doing so. “We had detainees from 15 different nationalities in our NDS detention facilities,” he told me. In fact, Seraj had personally interrogated Logari. He knew him as Hamed, a “bright, intelligent young man who spoke several languages fluently”. Seraj described how he brought religious scholars and even Logari’s father to his cell in an attempt to dissuade Logari from becoming a suicide bomber. But it was no use: “Once a person wants to become a suicide bomber, there’s nothing that can stop him.” Logari didn’t want freedom; he wanted paradise.

Seraj told me that he had shared everything the NDS had with the CIA, who would then brief Nato’s commander in Afghanistan, General Austin Miller, and other US officials. “Frankly speaking we were on the same page.” In fact, he warned anyone who would listen — whether the US, Pakistan, or Central Asian states — about the security threats. So why was he ignored?

During the postmortem of the chaotic US withdrawal, Biden blamed Trump and the US military intelligence apparatus which didn’t anticipate the speed of the Taliban takeover. He also blamed the Afghan government and the unwillingness of the Afghan army to fight. It seemed to play on tropes and criticisms made by journalists and Afghans for decades that Afghanistan was run by corrupt politicians and warlords.

Trump had dealt Biden a bad hand when he came to office in January 2021. The Afghan–American relationship had been damaged ever since the Doha Accords were signed between the Americans and the Taliban in February 2020. The agreement stipulated that the US would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan by 1 May 2021; the Taliban, in turn, promised to cut ties with al-Qaeda and sit down for peace talks with the Kabul government. Yet the democratically elected Afghan government wasn’t part of the discussions. 

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The deal had been engineered by Afghan-American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, an experienced figure who served under various US presidents, including Ronald Reagan in the Eighties, but whose rough and tumble diplomacy was not liked in Kabul. The US envoy had reached out to the Taliban without consulting the Afghan government. As Abdullah Khanjani, the government’s Deputy Minister for Peace, told me: “One of the key strategic problems with the whole structure of the peace process was that the Americans did not integrate the Afghan state and Afghan voices into it.”

By contrast, the negotiations empowered and legitimised the Taliban. According to Khanjani, with the Doha Accords, “a strategic propaganda opportunity was given to the Taliban, as an insurgent group. [US Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo sat there to endorse the deal with the legitimacy of being ex-CIA. And this was a shock to everyone. It was a game changer for the Taliban. And this also normalised the Taliban and [changed] the international system of power relations.” A green light was given for other countries to follow suit.

The Doha Accords also set the stage for the Abbey Gate attack. The terms of the deal included a prisoner swap, with the Taliban receiving 5,000 prisoners in exchange for 1,000 captives. The Afghan government was incensed by the condition: the US seemed to be treating Afghanistan as if it was not a sovereign nation but a plaything of empire. One day after the accords were signed, President Ashraf Ghani told reporters that “the government of Afghanistan has made no commitment to free[ing] 5,000 Taliban prisoners”, adding that 400 of those prisoners were “a threat to the world”. Seraj told me that many of those prisoners were involved in high-profile attacks including those on the German embassy in 2017, the Intercontinental Hotel in January 2018 and the G4S compound in November 2018. Some of those released, according to a senior government official, were not Taliban fighters but belonged to IS–KP and were related to the Taliban through familial and tribal links. Their release would mean that many would return to the insurgency. 

Neither the preliminary intra-Afghan peace talks in Doha nor the prisoner swap that followed resulted in a reduction in violence. Instead, they gnawed away at the state, creating the conditions for the chaos to come. According to Shuja Jamal, international relations director at the Afghan government’s National Security Council, more than 21,000 Afghan army soldiers were killed, injured, taken prisoner or deserted between March and October 2020. Attacks on journalists and politicians increased as well.

But perhaps more importantly, the prisoner swap demoralised the NDS — the very agency that the US needed to share vital local information. The officers who had interrogated the prisoners could now be identified and targeted by the Taliban and IS–KP. As Seraj explained, many of the NDS officers no longer wanted to risk carrying out interrogations and debriefings if the prisoners would be released.

“You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it,” Seraj added. He had always wanted to model the NDS on the CIA and focus purely on intelligence-gathering, but this soon proved impossible. Instead, Ghani tasked him with strengthening citizen militias that could resist the coming Taliban onslaught. But accepting the task, which he felt should be the military’s remit, made the NDS cumbersome. They were now working with local mayors and tribal and security chiefs on sourcing weapons instead of being the eyes and ears of the republic. And as government forces neared collapse, more problems piled up on Seraj’s desk. Instead of focusing on the enemy, the NDS were forced to investigate corruption allegations against these militias. “80% of our work fell to investigating those charges, while the enemy was at the gates.”

The US withdrawal also meant reducing the air support given to Afghan forces. “Our forces,” said Seraj, “had become so addicted to air support, that without it, it was very difficult for them to fight.” It meant that the Afghan army could not stop the Taliban advance, resulting in the swift collapse of the republic. The Taliban made the situation even more difficult by deliberately targeting Afghan pilots and many were unwilling to fly. Due to a domestic skill shortage the Afghan government tried to source foreign contractors who could service their aircraft, but with little success. In December 2020, National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib flew to Azerbaijan to buy drones which Baku had used to devastating effect against the Armenians in the second Nagorno-Karabakh War weeks earlier, but to no avail. Kabul also reached out to Turkey and the US, wanting to set up a special operations team that could deploy Predator and Reaper drones, but the US was reluctant to accede to their requests. 

Meanwhile, Pakistan was working to undermine the Afghan government. Although the US and Pakistan were allies, Islamabad had always viewed the US presence in Afghanistan as a threat to its nuclear arsenal, which it needed to counter its hostile neighbour, India. As a result, it could not support the US-backed government in Kabul and instead provided sanctuary to the Taliban. Seraj had confronted his Pakistani counterparts on the issue many times, but they would often deny or deflect the issue. 

The Trump administration aggravated the situation in other ways. After the US assassination of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, the situation in Afghanistan became more volatile. Tehran wanted revenge and allowed the Taliban to open up an office in Mashhad in north-eastern Iran. “There was a strong commitment from the Iranians to help the Taliban,” Seraj said. “It’s not that the Taliban are very friendly to them, it was just to see the US leave, and Taliban were used as a tool to expedite that process.”

When Biden came to office in January 2021 he pledged to “lead not merely by example of our power but by the power of our example. We will be a strong and trusted partner for peace, progress and security.” However, as Alexander Ward shows in his new book, The Internationalists, Biden had always been consistent about getting out of the nation-building business. After a review, he pressed ahead with Trump’s withdrawal policy, albeit with a slight delay. American troops would now leave by the end of August 2021.

Biden made the hand that Trump had dealt him even worse, at least from the perspective of his Afghan partners. The fact that they kept on Khalilzad, Trump’s special envoy, was a sign to Mohib that they would get more of the same. “He would be their fall guy,” Mohib told me. Moreover, as if to rub salt in the Afghans’ wounds, a scathing letter from the new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was leaked. It urged Ghani to return to the negotiating table, humiliating and alienating the Kabul government further. It showed the world how the US treated their “partners” and destroyed any goodwill left between Washington and Kabul. Afghan government delegations visited both Moscow and Tehran, apparently exploring other political options.

In February 2021, Seraj invited regional intelligence chiefs to a secret conference and urged them to support his government, warning that many of the extremist groups that plagued them, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), had close ties with the Taliban. The response was muted. “Those were the days when the popularity of the government was so low in Afghanistan,” Seraj recalled, “the neighbours didn’t take us seriously because they knew the government was dying.”

Four months later, Biden gave the order to withdraw. It was to be done as fast as possible: Washington wanted to reduce the risk to its own troops, but in its eagerness to leave, created the conditions for suicide bombers to flourish and move undetected. The US assessed that the Afghan army would hold out long enough to come to a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. But they didn’t take into account Pakistan’s role. 

Intense clashes between the Taliban and the Afghan army immediately broke out in Wardak and other areas. In June 2021, the Taliban took more territory and there was fighting in 26 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Speaking two years later, Fazli Rafi, the former Deputy National Security Advisor, told me that the government assessed that these attacks had a professional command and control structure. “The Taliban knew guerrilla warfare, but this time the Taliban were attacking in 24 different provinces with three different districts in each. That was over 100 battle fronts. We assessed that the Taliban could only attack five provinces. This was the work of a professional army – and Pakistan was implicated.” 

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On 22 June, Seraj’s overwhelming fear was realised. Sher Khan Bandar, the main crossing point on the border with Tajikistan, fell to the Taliban. The dam had been breached. The Afghan government could no longer control its own borders. It was now a case of salvaging whatever one could from the flood. 

Even at the height of the crisis, the president tried to sidestep ministers he felt were close to the Americans. Ghani had become very suspicious of ministers and political leaders. According to insiders, he felt that many Afghan leaders had private back channels with the US and the Taliban and were pursuing their own agendas. But marginalising the ministers only led to more chaos. When they ordered the commanders to do something, the latter responded by saying that the president had told them otherwise.

On 2 July, US troops withdrew from Bagram air base, the key entry point for American hardware and personnel for 20 years. Only a few troops stayed behind to protect the US embassy. By the end of that month, the southern cities of Herat, Kandahar and Lashkar Gah were scenes of intense fighting. In the first week of August, the Taliban assassinated Dawa Khan Menapal, President Ghani’s public relations chief. Reports of Taliban fighters settling old tribal scores on the Spin Boldak border crossing with Pakistan heightened the fear. 

By the time the president fled Kabul on 15 August, all the major cities had fallen. It was on that day that the Taliban opened the gates of Pul-i-Charkhi prison on the outskirts of Kabul. Taliban militants, as well as hardened criminals, emerged into the sunlight to taste freedom. And among the throng was Logari. 

Seraj was shocked by the president’s departure. Moments earlier, Ghani had called him personally saying that “we should not allow thieves and people to create chaos, we should use whatever force we still have to control the situation”. At the time, Seraj was in Kabul scrambling to secure the release of the governor of Herat, Ismail Khan, as well as trying to relieve Mazar-i-Sharif — the largest city in northern Afghanistan. When the Taliban entered Kabul, he made his way to the presidential palace with his side arm at the ready, intending to protect the Commander-in-Chief of the republic until the end. He expected a call from the president to join other ministers and officials at the palace and then wait for him to take a final decision on the right course of action. Ghani’s departure stunned him. He returned to the office and sat on his desk, numb. “I was speechless for 20 minutes.”

One by one, his WhatsApp groups also fell silent, as ministers and senior civil servants started to leave them. He received messages from his colleagues asking for instructions. But what could he tell them? Should he ask them to fight the Taliban? “The elected government that we’re fighting for has collapsed,” Seraj said. “So what was our legitimacy to stay on?” He continued to receive panicked messages from his colleagues asking for orders, but he had none to give, except that they should lie low and find safety as best they possibly can. The republic was no more and they were now on their own. A US State Department contact got Seraj out of the country, and he joined his wife who was already in London. 

As August passed and Seraj began to piece his life together, the chaos of Biden’s withdrawal became apparent. Today, there are already many reports that al-Qaeda are rebuilding, unimpeded. The UN security council recently noted that eight new camps had been established in 2024 alone. An organisation that appeared to be on life support, looking for a reason to exist, appears to be suddenly revived: in a piece published this month, al-Qaeda’s new leader, Sayf al-Adl, called for attacks on Western and Zionist targets. 

In such a world, it’s hard not to be reminded of Seraj’s earlier warning: “You knew the flood was coming, but you didn’t have the tools to fight it.”

For the “post-Pacifist” German mainstream, the most bitter paradox of all is that the Russians might not have attacked Ukraine had they foreseen Germany’s response: that the Bundestag would cancel the new Russian gas pipeline, invest in regasification terminals, send weapons to Ukraine, reaffirm its fealty to Nato, and move to drastically upgrade its armed forces with a €100 billion injection.

The Russians could not possibly have known these things. The day before Putin launched his invasion, the German government declared that the new Russian gas pipeline would be inaugurated no matter what, and that they would send no weapons to Ukraine; it even affirmed it would prevent Estonia’s delivery of 122mm howitzers to Kyiv because those guns had briefly belonged to Germany when the West German army absorbed East Germany’s. Yet more egregiously, Germany also denied overflight permission for British transports delivering weapons to Ukraine. As for Nato, Germany reiterated its refusal to spend 2% or even 1% of its GDP for defence. If there were to be collective defence at all, let it be European, and directed by the decidedly civilian European Commission.

In that remote past of a month ago, those were all decidedly mainstream preferences throughout Europe, albeit with a north-south divide. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden had all resurrected their ancient Baltic connections and therefore viewed Russia as a live threat. But in Italy and Spain such attitudes were rare, and declared Putin admirers could become ministers in coalition governments. As for France, Macron did not oppose the effectively pro-Russian stance of the German government because he also wanted a European defence, led by France, of course, as the only European nuclear power.

All this has now slipped into oblivion in today’s Europe, where Nato’s centrality and its US leadership are largely uncontested. The Russians assessed Nato as weak because it was weak, and therefore attacked Ukraine. Yet because they attacked, Nato is stronger than it has been for decades.

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In every country’s military, the equally abrupt reversals are causing no end of trouble for the staff officers and civil servants working on next year’s budgets. The infantry is once again the queen of the battlefield, empowered as it is by anti-tank missiles that pursue armoured vehicles until they destroy them, and by portable anti-aircraft missiles that are the doom of helicopters, even if they cannot intercept much faster jets. This means that current combat helicopter and armoured vehicle purchases should be cancelled until they can be redesigned with much better protection; that is active defences that detect and intercept the incoming missiles — a process that might take years. (So far only Israel has active defence systems for its armoured vehicles )

By contrast, killer drones that can reliably destroy armoured vehicles and anything else beyond the horizon are grotesquely underfunded given their demonstrated combat value, largely because they are captive to air force priorities, set by pilots and ex-pilot senior officers. Only with political intervention can the stranglehold of the flying fraternity be overcome — they are today’s reactionary horse cavalry that resisted tanks in the Twenties. But the main thing, of course, is to have more infantry and to train it very well, and that raises the need for compulsory military service which only Sweden has confronted so far — by re-instituting it.

Because Nato has not instituted a no-flight zone, for the excellent reason that it would lead to air combat that the loser might try to nullify by escalation, and with everything happening much too fast for adult supervision, no new air combat lessons have been learned. While the heroism of Ukrainian pilots flying older models of Russian aircraft against newer models is highly admirable, it adds nothing that is not already written in The Iliad.

At the level of grand strategy, the largest and by far most consequential discovery is that in spite of decades of talk about the “diffusion of power”, particularly with the rise of China but also of Turkey, Iran, Brazil and South Africa, it is still the same old G7 countries that hold the keys of the world. Once the US, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom and the European Union make a decision, any country can be cut off from world finance and most of world commerce. Russia’s Aeroflot, for instance, had to stop flying abroad because its aircraft are leased from Western companies, and the money-transfer sanctions blocked its payments to them, leading to the confiscation of its aircraft if they land outside Russia.

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That would not bother the Chinese, whose airlines do not depend on foreign lessors. But by the second day of the Ukraine war, Beijing realised that China also lives in a G7 world, with its economy utterly dependent on the daily arrival of bulk carriers loaded with animal and human food from the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and a slew of other countries. China’s economy was self-sufficient if miserably poor in 1976 when I first visited, with a population on the edge of malnutrition. But today’s citizens will not grin and bear it without their meat, eggs, or milk. Last year, Xi Jinping’s naval groupies, including the jovial retired Admiral Luo Yuan, suggested that the US could be scared off from defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion by sinking a US warship or two, perhaps even an aircraft carrier. Now Xi must realise that if a US warship is sunk, the supply of animal feed would end.

Finally for the United States, the greatest lesson of immediate importance is that its foreign and defence policies are drastically degraded by the lack of basic intelligence about foreign countries — not because the CIA fails to steal their war plans, but because it cannot acquire elementary situational awareness. This is an inevitable consequence of a cultural collapse: in the old days, a CIA officer appointed to serve in a foreign country whose language he did not know would apply himself furiously to learn as much of it as possible. But now, very few CIA officers speak any foreign language. Their superiors do not demand that they learn them, and they themselves are too busy chatting with each other to talk with the locals — other than with English-speaking local counterparts who mostly tell them what they want to hear.

This is why Biden paid a high political price for the effortless Taliban conquest of Afghanistan and the rapid fall of Kabul: the CIA told the White House that the Afghan army would hold out on its own for much more than a decent interval, for years perhaps, and said nothing at all to suggest that it might crumble without a fight. Not knowing Tajik, Uzbek, or any Pathan dialect, the CIA officers who uselessly served in Kabul from their offices did not overhear the jokes on the street about the Afghan army, or hilarious accounts of how incompetent fools could become instant officers by paying a modest bribe.

Because American generals, including media-star David Petraeus, flatly refused to call upon the regiments of Pathans, Tadjiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras who might fight out of ethnic solidarity, instead creating a mythical national “Afghan” army, the result was a fraud from day one. When the time came, they did not fight or even flee: they handed over their US-supplied weapons to the Taliban.

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In Kyiv, exactly the same thing happened, but in reverse. Just as in Kabul, we had CIA officers with no situational awareness. They did not listen, or understand, or even speak Ukrainian — they proclaimed it unnecessary “because everyone speaks Russian”, before sheepishly admitting that they themselves did not. Hence the CIA told the White House that Zelenskyy would flee, that the government would dissolve, that the Ukrainian army would not fight, and that the Russians would control Kyiv in 24 hours.

Since the White House still gave credence to the CIA in spite of its long history of incompetence, it ordered the urgent, even panicked evacuation of the US diplomatic mission to Lviv. Had they had any idea at all, they might have noticed that the Russians proposed to invade Europe’s largest country with very few troops — 150,000 compared to the 800,000 sent into far smaller Czechoslovakia in 1968 — and told the White House that with a bit of help the Ukrainians would contain the invasion.

But the CIA is highly professional in its press relations, and sure enough the New York Times promptly published an article that featured “former intelligence officers” highlighting the impossibility of ascertaining “fighting spirit”. It was as neat an illustration as any of why Kabul fell, and why Kyiv could too. Unless the US remedies its CIA problem by emptying out and fumigating the place, before restaffing it with people who care enough about the world to learn its languages, the US will continue to fly blind — and crash into the next Ukraine.

Earlier this week, when the White House’s press spokeswoman Jen Psaki was asked about this ignominious withdrawal, she refused to concede that there was anything wrong with it: “I would say that this is now on track to be the largest airlift in US history. So no, I would not say that it is anything but a success.”

The long-term consequences of the collapse of Afghanistan will naturally take time to come into focus. But it seems unlikely that they will be associated with “success”. Already it seems inevitable that America’s enemies — in particular China — will have noted how easy it is to push around the world’s superpower. Meanwhile, America’s allies now face challenges of their own; the EU and UK now surely know that they need to be more operationally adept, capable of doing basic things like holding an airport without requiring the support of the US.

Of course, none of this can be predicted with absolute certainty. And yet I strongly suspect that there is at least one consequence that Europe can anticipate as a foregone conclusion: that, thanks to the fall of Afghanistan, in the coming months and years the West will experience a new migration challenge that it is incapable of preventing.

Throughout the last decade, the migration crisis in Europe has been exacerbated by the fact that many European governments and citizens had nothing but sympathy for the millions of immigrants — many of them from Syria — whose homelands have been destroyed by war. Indeed, when Angela Merkel steps down this year, she will largely be remembered for her decision in 2015 to open Germany’s borders to Syrian refugees.

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Yet although there have been large numbers of Syrians among those who arrived in Europe in the past six years, Syrian refugees did not make up the bulk of the arrivals. Instead, the Syrian migrants ended up inadvertently becoming the sharp tip of the world’s migration demands. Behind them came people from a bewildering array of other countries; from across Africa, the Middle East and Far East.

Even then, Afghan refugees were certainly among them. I met many myself in the refugee camps of southern Europe. On one occasion, I spent the day with a group of Hazara Afghans, a persecuted Persian-speaking minority group. I remember one of them asking me why Syrians should be given priority over Afghans when applying for asylum in the EU. After all, he said, by that point Syria had only been at war for five years. His country had been at war for 15 years. Should that not be taken into account?

It was — and remains — an important question. One of the most complex aspects of the global migration challenge is the fact that everybody has a competing claim to asylum, and that privileging one group inevitably comes at the expense of another.

In any case, it is striking that six years ago, Germany and almost every other European country reported the same phenomenon, which was that many people said they were Syrians in order to get into Europe. However, once they were inside, very few countries were able to verify this. And for much of the general public it was enough to be told that Europe was responding to a “refugee” crisis rather than a “migrant crisis”.

Which brings us back to the situation in Afghanistan today. In the coming months and years, there will invariably be a steady flow of refugees fleeing the Taliban’s Afghanistan. The hurried nature of the American departure means that there will have been people left behind who have a credible case for asylum in the West. And as the Taliban’s rule once again reasserts itself, they will attempt to flee.

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At the same time, within the West there will be a prevailing cloud of shame hanging over the way in which Afghanistan has been abandoned. NGOs and other groups will argue that we all have a moral obligation to accept refugees fleeing Afghanistan. As ever, they will not bother specifying where this obligation begins or ends. Many will be persuaded that we are in some way responsible for Afghanistan not being a thriving liberal democracy. They will be told that we are responsible for Afghanistan’s precarious humanitarian situation. And because there will be a grain of truth in this — if nothing else then because of the nature of the exit — it will be exceptionally difficult to reject those claiming to be fleeing Afghanistan.

The problem will lie, as it always does, in the details. No European country or border force has anything like the number of experts required to work out where exactly those entering Europe have come from. The dearth of language experts alone has remained unfixed since 2015. And as a result, no doubt many migrants who are not from Afghanistan will recognise the benefits of pretending that they are.

Some of this will affect America, though its geographic position makes it a less accessible destination. Europe does not have the same luxury. Indeed, one border official I spoke to last week said that the UK is already seeing an increase in the number of people crossing the English Channel claiming to be Afghan refugees. In many cases, this will be untrue. After all, if it were then they got to the UK awfully fast.

But is it so surprising that they would say such a thing? No doubt they are aware that the UK and EU feel morally sordid over the Afghan withdrawal. The smuggling gangs will certainly know this, and will advise migrants on how to use it to their advantage.

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What will make it more complex still is that politicians and the public cannot have an honest conversation about the impact of this new migrant wave. At times of humanitarian crisis such as these, most Western Europeans do not want to hear politicians being “heartless”. But after their experience of 2015, it seems unlikely that they will want them to be too relaxed either.

The British public, for instance, currently believes that it is their moral duty to take in refugees from Afghanistan. But I suspect that feeling will not last indefinitely. It will take years for us to know how many Afghans decide to flee to Europe. It seems likely, though, that while a significant number will come from Afghanistan, an even more significant number will arrive pretending to be Afghans. And once they see Europe welcoming these migrants with open arms, others will likely follow.

There can be little doubt that those concerned about the safety of Afghanistan’s refugees are well-intentioned. But that doesn’t mean those good intentions won’t be exploited. And when that happens, neither European citizens nor European governments will be capable of dealing with the consequences.

It is more dispiriting, from a British perspective, to realise that our own elites are, if anything, even worse. Observing the efforts of backbench Conservative MPs to summon up interest in a crusade to defend the Kabul government’s writ on a country where its own regional governors and security forces are either surrendering en masse to the Taliban or actively defecting to their side is concerning enough. When we see our defence minister doing the same, we should be worried.

As I begin writing this article, Kabul’s sphere of influence barely extends to the city limits; whether it will extend that far by the time I’ve finished is doubtful. President Ghani has fled the country; the Taliban are inside the presidential palace. There is no Afghan state left to defend. There is no Afghan army to support. And even if there were, given the British Army’s total inability to pacify one single Afghan province, Helmand, with the constant support of American air power that will no longer exist by the end of this month, it is far beyond our capacity even to dream of doing so. It is no good saying something must be done, after twenty failed years of trying everything. The Afghan war is over, and we lost.

Equally, the meaningless noises being emitted by Labour’s leadership that somehow the UK can gather key stakeholders around a table and hammer out a solution that is distinct from Taliban victory are simply gibberish of the highest order. The Taliban is already doing so, negotiating the surrender of the Kabul government’s military and administrative functionaries through the mediation of tribal elders and religious clerics, and are doing so far more effectively than Lisa Nandy will ever be capable of.

Indeed, the central fact of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan over the past two weeks, under-emphasised though it may be by the solipsistic tone of Western discourse, is precisely how little fighting has been involved. The Taliban has taken over provinces one after the other with barely a shot being fired. When even long-time anti-Taliban leaders like the veteran warlord Ismail Khan, who once ruled the western region of Herat like a medieval king, are meekly submitting to their rule, or even being deployed to Kabul to negotiate the Government’s surrender on the Taliban’s behalf, the ability of even such diplomatic titans as Starmer’s front bench to change the outcome of the war must be firmly ruled out.

If anything, the nature of the Taliban takeover offers glimpses of how they may approach their second period of rule. Their emphasis on seizing power, in these final stages, through negotiation rather than open conflict, accords well with traditional Afghan, particularly Pashtun, systems of dispute settlement.

In fact, the nature of the transfer of power elicits many parallels with the newish social-scientific sub-discipline of rebel governance studies, which aims to unsettle the Hobbesian norms dominant in International Relations theory which hold that only states can provide stable governance, and that non-state actors necessarily leave anarchy and violence in their wake.

This is not so: a burgeoning crop of academic literature focusing on rebel governance in Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Middle East highlights how, in fact, non-state actors across the world win popular support or at least acquiescence through a variety of methods, including the provision of services such as justice and dispute resolution, medical services, sharing of power through local government and appeals to traditional or other forms of moral authority not open to either the central state or external intervening powers.

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As it happens, I’m currently engaged in PhD research looking at rebel governance in Northeast Syria manifest by the Kurdish-led, radical Left-wing Democratic Union Party. The initial Taliban effort, despite their coming from entirely the opposite ideological pole, strongly suggests the utility of this approach in divining what Taliban 2.0 rule may look like for Afghanistan. Firstly, as already noted, the Taliban’s recourse to mediation through pillars of traditional moral and political authority like the clergy and tribal leaders in seizing power supports observations social scientists have derived from fieldwork in Afghanistan.

The counterinsurgency, or COIN doctrine, that so enamoured American generals and their British military hangers-on in the early and mid-2000s, held that external intervening powers could “lend” legitimacy to the embattled central state through infrastructural and other projects, which led, in Afghanistan’s case, to ambitious and ultimately fruitless showpiece schemes like the British Army’s escorting of equipment for a hydroelectric dam across Taliban-held Helmand.

Yet fieldwork in Afghanistan especially shows the precise opposite: the dependency on external powers taints the central government it is intended to support in the eyes of traditional rural populations, who are generally unsupportive of foreign occupations. COIN doctrine is based on a fundamental misapprehension of the nature of political legitimacy: local actors, embedded within and drawn from the ranks of local populations, will almost always be able to outcompete both the central state and even the most well-meaning and idealistic of colonial administrators in the battle for hearts and minds.

Already, the Taliban have issued numerous proclamations assuring the administrative functionaries of what we must now call the former government of amnesty: captured soldiers are being released, surrendered regional governors escorted back to Kabul, and bank workers, street cleaners, school teachers and traffic police told to resume their work — with some exceptions. Female bank tellers have, apparently, been ordered home in Herat, and replaced with their male relatives; female school teachers told they are only allowed to continue working if they don the chador, and their female pupils the hijab. Taliban governance in its second iteration is likely to be as restrictive for women as it was in its first.

This does not necessarily dampen the group’s legitimacy across the country; indeed, in the conservative rural provinces it may well enhance it. Yet in any case, the United States did not enter Afghanistan to advance the rights of women: if that was the West’s overriding concern, it would not have helped topple the previous communist regime, for whom gender equality was a major cause.

The cause of advancing gender equality in Kabul or Herat or Mazar-i-Sharif is a noble one, yet if the downstream consequence of enabling women’s rights in the cities is CIA-backed death squads murdering teenage boys in their village homes at night, the moral calculus is less clear. Biden, like Trump before him, has made the conclusion that the costs are not worth the benefits. Whether, once Taliban rule is secured, both international and local pressure can salvage some of the gains made for Afghan women is an open question  There is, at this point, no other alternative policy in any case. We shall see.

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This is not to underplay the brutality the Taliban are capable of. Working in Herat in 2014, I met and interviewed harmless Afghan peasants who had their fingers amputated for the crime of voting in the country’s democratic elections, part of the Taliban campaign to dissuade ordinary Afghans, through fear, of engaging with the rival central government. Already we have seen Taliban fighters summarily execute members of government-backed militias they accuse of atrocities against captured Taliban, and they have announced that there will be no mercy for either the country’s erstwhile president Ghani or the Uzbek warlord Marshal Dostum, both of whom, in any case, seem to have already fled the country.

Yet as the rebel governance literature shows, most violence occurs when control of a country is contested between two forces of more or less equal reach: once firm dominance is established by either party, local legitimacy tends to be achieved by amnesties in exchange for submitting to the victor’s authority, a process which we see occur in civil war after civil war. In any case, it must be noted that the measured application of brutality as often affords local legitimacy as it erodes it. The Taliban began, after all, as a local protest movement against the sexual abuse of young boys by warlord militia commanders, who they then hanged from tank barrels to local acclaim.

But the Taliban doesn’t just seek local legitimacy: for their rule to thrive they also need international legitimacy, and though it is very early days, much of their recent output seems designed to secure it. They have already reassured both China and Russia that they have no desire to export disorder beyond their borders, and are likely to be rewarded with recognition, and even investment, once they take Kabul.

For the Taliban to secure recognition from the European Union, which is keen to either continue or resume the deportation of Afghan asylum seekers from within its borders, it will be necessary to avoid the ethnic and sectarian persecutions that marred their previous term of rule. Already, we have seen the Taliban assure Shia worshippers that they will be allowed to worship openly under Taliban protection, and have appointed an ethnic Hazara governor for the Shia ethnic Hazara Bamiyan region, where they have taken control, so far, without firing a shot.

Their seizure of power first focussed on the the Dari and Uzbek-speaking strongholds of the Northern Alliance that had long resisted their rule, with the result that they now control more of the country than they did on 9/11. Minorities with long histories of resistance against and persecution by the Taliban will naturally fear what will come next: yet if the price of international recognition from external powers is delegation of local governance to ethnic minority leaders — as we are already seeing — and the avoidance of senseless killing for the sake of it, then there is every chance that this is what will result.

The present-day Taliban has already shown itself as a sophisticated and competent diplomatic actor on both the world and local stage: it is far from certain that they are so wedded to killing that they will forego the lavish reconstruction money certain to head their way if they can avoid it.

As for recognition by the United States, it will surely come in time: the Taliban were welcome diplomatic interlocutors before 9/11, and their campaign against their mutual enemy the Islamic State, which will now be pursued with all the American weaponry they have captured from the collapsing Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, will eventually make them a useful, if distant de facto partner.

It is strange to see an American foreign policy establishment which urges American engagement or even support for Syrian jihadist factions ideologically indistinct from the Taliban so distraught at the outcome in Afghanistan. If a qualified outreach can be made to even former al-Qaeda factions in Syria, including ones led by veterans of the Afghan jihad deployed by the al-Qaeda leader himself, on the basis that they promise not to attack the West, then it is difficult to see why the same logic cannot be applied further from the West’s shores.

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Whether or not the Taliban will continue to provide a haven for the al-Qaeda leadership is another question: but America’s notional ally Pakistan already does, with little censure. In any case, as in northwestern Syria, the United States retains the capability to assassinate senior al-Qaeda figures through carefully targeted drone strikes with minimal collateral damage, and with far less costs involved than in the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan.

So, at this stage, it looks like we are observing the dying days, even hours, of the American phase of the Afghan War. We must hope that the end of Afghanistan’s more than forty years of civil conflict are also drawing to a close. Afghanistan will still need Western support for reconstruction, the financial lures of which ought to be used to salvage what can be salvaged of the genuine advances for human rights made over the past two decades across the government-controlled portions of the country.

Whether the Taliban leadership, in Doha or in Pakistan, can maintain effective enough control of their fighters on the ground, buoyed by victory, to prevent a repeat of the urban fighting that destroyed Kabul in the 1990s is now the most pressing question; whether the assurances of amnesty and cooperation the Taliban leadership are giving its defeated opponents can be trusted, or whether they will revert to totalitarian excess, is the next.

Yet if the initial signs of Taliban political outreach to its conquered enemy are sustained over time, then the results might be similar to the 2001 offer they made to hand over Bin Laden for trial and engage in power-sharing negotiations, which the Americans rebuffed. Perhaps some Western leader, somewhere, will learn something from all this: from the evidence so far, that remains doubtful. But either way, whatever happens in Afghanistan now is up to Afghans to decide.