Tuesday 3 August 2021

I wrote to London that we should now base our planning for the summer on the assumption that the republic would lose one or more major cities in August, maybe Lashkar Gah and Kandahar, and that this was looking increasingly likely to happen within the next seven days….The republic would be unlikely to recover if it lost Kandahar, which could in turn set off a cascading crisis as the republic’s losses mounted and its ability to do anything about them evaporated.