Afghanistan’s government has now lost a third of the country’s provincial capitals in just a week
KANDAHAR AND HERAT, Afghanistan’s second- and third-largest cities, had been under assault for days. On August 12th both fell into the hands of the Taliban. So did a string of other cities, in what amounted to a rout of Afghan forces. Among them were Lashkar Gah, in Helmand province in the south, and Ghazni, near Kabul, the capital. Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s president, has now lost around half the country’s provincial towns and cities in just a week.
Even then, it was hoped that the Afghan government and its army, larger, on paper, than the Taliban, might consolidate around major cities to halt the insurgents’ advance. Instead, as the crisis has accelerated, American intelligence assessments have turned gloomier, lengthening the odds of Mr Ghani’s government surviving. The capital could be surrounded and cut off in a month, and fall within 90 days, according to one assessment leaked in Washington on August 10th.
Both countries had hoped it would not come to that. It carries humiliating echoes of Vietnam for America and colonial retreats for the British. Kabul was the scene of the first military evacuation airlift in 1928-29 when the entire diplomatic corps was ferried in Royal Air Force biplanes over the Hindu Kush to escape a tribal uprising. On July 8th Mr Biden had waved away any comparison with the evacuation of Saigon, the capital of south Vietnam, in 1975.
Kabul’s parks, meanwhile, are filled with poorer Afghans displaced from provinces in the north. Thousands of families from Kunduz, Takhar and other regions now lost to the government have reached the capital this week. Around 390,000 people have been displaced this year, according to the United Nations. “We are bracing ourselves for a major humanitarian crisis,” says Tracey Van Heerden, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s acting country director in Afghanistan.
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