The Taliban’s rapid advance is chilling but a united response can still avert catastrophe
The fall of Afghanistan to fundamentalist Taliban forces is a disaster foretold. Although the capital, Kabul, remains in government hands, the scale and speed of the insurgents’ advance has left no doubt who now holds the upper hand. This swift implosion is likened to the final days of the Vietnam war, when the Viet Cong overran Saigon in April 1975. If what the world is witnessing is the moral as well as the physical collapse of a nation, the fall of France in June 1940 may be the better analogy.
The success, though not the startling rapidity, of the Taliban’s many-fronted offensive in seizing key provincial capitals and much of rural Afghanistan was predictable once it became clear, in June, that residual US forces were rushing to leave. The foolish, unilateral American decision to quit at short notice effectively obliged Britain and other Nato allies to follow. It wrongfooted government forces. It gave Taliban leaders the opening they had awaited for 20 years.