15 August 2021. I messaged London. ‘Taliban are through the palace gate.’ Shortly afterwards, pictures appeared on social media of the Taliban gathered around Ghani’s desk in the Presidential Palace, from which he had broadcast to the nation a few hours before. Kabul had fallen. The Taliban had taken Kabul.  On the third anniversary of…

The Taliban captured the city of Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz province, next to the Iranian border in the southwest of Afghanistan. Above all, Zaranj mattered because it was the first provincial capital to fall to the Taliban. Its fall turned out to be the beginning of the end. Over the nine days that followed,…

Our dilemma over whether and when to close the embassy was becoming pressing….Move too early and we would risk bringing the whole edifice down….Move too late, and we could put our people at unacceptably high risk of being killed or taken hostage by the Taliban, by ISKP or by other extremists….We just did not know…