New Delhi: Kabul's fall looked imminent on Saturday as Taliban continued to expand their territorial stranglehold in Afghanistan. A former Afghan MP Shukria Barakzai, who also served as Afghanistan's ambassador to Norway, made a strong pitch for UN intervention.
"This is the exact time for the United Nations to intervene in Pakistan," she told an Indian television channel participating in a virtual discussion programme on Saturday evening.
"Pakistan is blind not to see the atrocities in Afghanistan; shame on such a neighbour which supports Taliban barbarism," she lashed out at authorities in Islamabad.
"The monster they are supporting today will come for them tomorrow," Ms Barakzai went on to add.
She said that many people have come to Kabul believing that the capital will not be captured. This is a 'strong message' to the Taliban that people do not want to live under Taliban control.
The Talibans (the name coming the word students or Talibs) but representing hardliner Islamic norms ruled Afghanistan earlier between 1996 and 2001.
The so called foreig policy office and defence ministry of the Talibans are elsewhere, but the highest policy making body the Central Council is in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, US embassy officials in Kabul, according to AFP reports, have been ordered to begin 'shredding and burning sensitive material'. The first American troops from a planned 3,000-strong re-deployment started arriving to secure the airport and oversee evacuations of American diplomats and others.
Kabul has effectively become the besieged, the reports claimed.
The US officials and Pentagon in Washington said Taliban fighters were “trying to isolate” the Kabul city.
However, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said: “Kabul is not right now in an imminent threat environment".
For many western countries too, the Afghan misadventure has simply boomeranged.
In Germany, non-state actors have mooted the idea of an independent review to find details of Germany’s ‘most expensive and bloodiest’ battle. The western forces suffered an estimated 35,000 casualties including 25,000 Americans.
Recognising the 'former armed groups' in Afghanistan and providing them with money and weapons and virtually making them partners was a mistake. In a simple sense, analysts would today say the west; NATO and the US simply got things wrong.
The mistakes started on Oct 7, 2001 when the first bombs were dropped.
As a starting point, some are already saying right at the beginning – that is 2001 – the over hasty decision to wage a war in Afghanistan was a mistake by the then Bush administration.
And the timing of the exit was also like one of those historical blunders. But yet again, the Biden administration could not have done much. For America, it is perhaps like another Vietnam.
Former US President Donald Trump called the latest saga a “tragic mess”. Trump further wrote, “Do you miss me yet?”
In Herat, the Taliban has captured a strong war-lord Ismail Khan.
Pro-Taliban social media accounts have been boasting of the vast spoils of war captured by the insurgents. They even claimed the seizure of a drone from abandoned military bases.
