NYT: Surprising Fall of Kabul Terminates USA Era in Afghanistan

The New York Times (NYT)" a US wide-circulated daily newspaper, said today, Monday,  that the sweeping of the Taliban through Kabul,  the Afghani capital, terminates actually the US era in the country that lasted for twenty years.

The newspaper revealed that the former Afghani President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.

But a panel of ex-Afghani officials including President Hamid Karzai said that  they will hold new talks with the Taliban regarding the takeover authority in Afghanistan.

The insurgents of the Taliban took over the whole country yesterday.

The NYT added that the speed and boldness of the Taliban in sweeping the cities of Afghanistan one after one last week proved the failure of the US government and its army.

On the other hand, US military helicopters quickly arranged to evacuate the sprawling US Embassy compound in Kabul and transport diplomats and Afghan embassy workers to Kabul military airport.

Several Afghan nationals were seen, at the nearby civilian airport, crying and begging airline workers to put their families on commercial flights heading abroad, even though most of them were being stopped in order to take off military aircraft.

Two decades after US forces invaded Afghanistan to root out the al-Qaeda terrorists implicated in the September 11, 2001 attacks, the American experience there is in ruins, undermined by misguided and often contradictory policies and a relentless insurgency whose survival has been greatly underestimated by American military planners.

NYT said that more than 2,400 American soldiers were killed and thousands more were wounded in an attempt to build a satellite Afghan government, while tens of thousands of Afghani civilians were killed in the fighting and thousands more were displaced from their homes, and in recent days alone thousands fled to Kabul while the Taliban advanced through other cities rapidly.

The New York Times added that the outcome of the war fell largely on the Afghan armed forces in recent years, and that there were no appropriate US training or equipment stages, despite the high cost of the war, which amounted to about $83 billion, sufficient to create a security force ready to fight the Taliban.

At the same time, officials in Washington said that the speed of the collapse surprised the Biden administration and left it with the knowledge that he would go down in history as the president who oversaw the last "humiliating" act in a long and confusing American chapter in Afghanistan.

Now, Afghans face the prospect of the Taliban once again seizing power, especially since in the areas recently seized  by the Taliban, there has been no indication that the armed group intends to move away from applying strict laws.