A US soldier points his gun at an Afghan passenger at Kabul’s international airport on Aug 16. Thousands of people gathered at the airport as they tried to flee the capital after Taliban forces seized the city on Aug 15 and took control of the country. (WAKIL KOHSAR / AFP)

Pouring into the presidential palace, standing beside their leader who sits at a grand table in a spacious office, holding guns and reciting from the holy book of Islam — this was among the many scenes that unfolded in Afghanistan on Aug 15 as the Taliban took control of Kabul with lightning speed. 

The Islamic group’s takeover of the Afghan capital city came just ten days after their rapid advances across the country stunned many in the world, including United States President Joe Biden, who has turned to blame the now-gone Afghan administration, led by Ashraf Ghani, and others for the worst debacle of the US-led NATO in decades.

Days before, Biden administration officials and intelligence people were predicting that a Taliban seizure of Kabul was unlikely for at least several weeks.

On Aug 14, Ghani was sitting in the same palace pledging to prevent further instability in his country in a televised address after the Taliban captured its first provincial capital on Aug 6 in western Afghanistan. 

Then he fled the country, with the destination initially unknown to the world but later turning out to be the United Arab Emirates. 

Ghani has been bitterly criticized by former ministers for leaving the country suddenly as Taliban forces entered Kabul on Aug 15. But he claimed on the night of Aug 18 that he “was forced to leave Kabul and decided to leave my country in order to prevent bloodshed.”

He made the statement during a live Facebook broadcast from the UAE. “If I had stayed, I would be witnessing bloodshed in Kabul,” he said.

The White House is finding itself in a new crisis after a botched withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan, overwhelmed by withering criticism from home and abroad.

Biden blamed the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan on Afghan political leaders who fled the country and the unwillingness of the Afghan army to fight the militant group.

Earlier, Reuters quoted witnesses as saying at least five people were killed at Kabul airport on August 16 when people clung to departing aircraft as they were taking off from the Afghan capital.

A viral video clip shows a crowd of Afghans running alongside a US military transport aircraft, with some clinging to the fuselage, as it gained speed on the tarmac at the airport in Kabul. There was also footage of what appears to be individuals falling in mid-air after the plane took off.

Pundits have used the phrase “Saigon moment” to describe what was unfolding in Kabul, where photographers captured images of a Chinook helicopter flying near the US embassy amid a hasty evacuation ahead of the Taliban’s complete takeover of the city.

The photos were eerily similar to scenes from the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, when the US hurried to airlift the last of its personnel and some Vietnamese from the roof of its embassy in late April 1975, a moment widely believed to be a symbol of Washington’s failings in the Southeast Asian country.

Senior US officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have sought to reject such a comparison and claimed that the country has achieved its mission in the Afghan war.

Biden said on Aug 16 that the mission of the US was never supposed to be nation building. 

“I stand squarely behind my decision,” Biden said. “After 20 years I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw US forces. That’s why we’re still there.”

“The truth is: this did unfold more quickly than we anticipated,” Biden said.

Biden also said his decision is a result of the commitment he made to American troops that he was not going to ask them to continue to risk their lives for a war that should have ended long ago.

“Our leaders did that in Vietnam when I got here as (a) young man. I will not do it in Afghanistan,” he said. “I know my decision will be criticized but I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision on to another president.”

Asked if the US drawdown could have been handled better, Biden replied, during an interview with ABC News, “No, I don’t think it could have been handled in a way that ... but the idea that somehow, to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens.”

Though Biden defended himself against the criticism, his popularity dropped as the Taliban entered the capital, Kabul, wiping away two decades of US military presence that took an enormous toll in terms of costs and human lives.

His approval rating dropped by 7 percentage points and hit its lowest level, after the Afghan government collapsed this past weekend, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies, said “the events of Aug 15 in Kabul were a long time coming.”

“At the end of the day, the US failure was essentially a failure of political will,” said Gupta.

Gupta said the war in Afghanistan had “essentially degenerated into a draw by 2008 itself. And after 2011 when (Osama) Bin Laden was killed, there was no good reason for the US military to hang on indefinitely in Afghanistan.”

What the US lacked was “the political courage to force the government in Kabul and the Taliban into a power-sharing deal,” because former president Barack Obama’s administration did not want such a political grouping, he said.

So it pretended to continue the fight, he said.

This was the same case with former president Donald Trump’s administration, until it bit the bullet in mid-2019 and decided to opt for a negotiated drawdown with the Taliban, said Gupta.

“In the end, Biden stuck with Trump’s strategy, but failed like the Trump team to carry through on its negotiated commitments with the Taliban, and just exited the theater altogether,” he said.

Since invading Afghanistan in 2001 in response to the Sept 11 terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 people in the US, Washington has spent US$2.26 trillion on the war, which includes operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

Figures from the project also showed that more than 2,400 US service members, some 3,800 American contractors, more than 1,100 other allied troops, and an estimated 66,000 Afghan national military and police were killed in the conflict, along with more than 47,000 civilians.

The rapid Taliban sweep occurred despite billions of dollars spent by the US and NATO over nearly 20 years to build up Afghan security force. 

Peter Ricketts, a former British national security adviser, tweeted that Washington’s “unilateralism over their withdrawal has done real damage” to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, alliance.

Peter Galbraith, a former UN special representative to Afghanistan, has said the country’s rapid fall reflects the Afghan people’s lack of confidence in the state and longstanding government corruption.

“The Taliban forces were significantly smaller than the government forces. They didn’t have any of the modern weapons that the government forces had; they didn’t have an air force,” he told the BBC’s Global Newswire.

“But… the corruption was such that police and soldiers were not paid for months. They were not resupplied with bullets. They were not resupplied with food. And then when the collapse began, what was clear is that nobody wants to fight and risk dying in a war that is already lost.”

Amina Khan, director of the Centre for Afghanistan, Middle East and Africa at the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad, said the masses in Afghanistan have been sick of the war, poverty, the lack of jobs as well as the levels of corruption that have plagued the country.

According to Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Center for Research and Security Studies in Pakistan, the fall of major cities and the capital in a very short time reflects the domino effect that Biden’s July 8 troop withdrawal announcement has had on Afghanistan.

In the meantime, experts also took into account Taliban’s new strategy of “trying to win hearts and minds”, in their military advance, as another key factor behind their rapid success in Afghanistan. The militants have been aware that they cannot repeat the same mistakes they made two decades ago.

After taking over the country, Taliban on Aug 17 vowed to respect women’s rights, forgive the people who fought against them and ensure that the country does not provide cover for terrorists. 

Talks also continued the same day between the Taliban and several Afghan politicians, including former president Hamid Karzai, and Abdullah Abdullah, who once led the country’s negotiating council. The Taliban have said they want to form an “inclusive, Islamic government”.

Salman Bashir, former foreign secretary of Pakistan, said the speed of Taliban success on the ground has laid bare the wrong assumptions of the US and Western analysts about the Taliban.

Michael Kugelman, deputy director at the Wilson Center think tank in Washington, told the BBC that he considers it too early to believe that the Taliban will keep their promise of not indulging in retribution.

The Taliban of 2021 appears to be different from its predecessor with its PR strategy, he said. However, the global community needs to be cautious as these are early days, he said.

Richard Haass, president of US think tank Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on Twitter that he believes “the grim aftermath of America’s strategic and moral failure will reinforce questions about U.S. reliability among friends and foes far and wide.”

The lesson from Afghanistan is that international and regional conflicts “cannot be resolved through unilateral military intervention or war” but only through “peaceful negotiations and consultation,” Zhu Zhiqun, professor of International Relations and Political Science at Bucknell University, told Xinhua in an interview. 

Xinhua and agencies contributed to the report.