On page 79 of August in Kabul, Andrew Quilty introduces us to Nadia Amini, a 19-year-old student of Tajik descent who attends a madrassa, or religious school, in the Afghan capital. She is completing her third-semester exams with ambitions to become a lawyer.

None of that came to pass as the Taliban swept into Kabul in mid-August, 2021. In the process, Nadia’s own life disintegrated.
Her father had promised her as a bride to a Taliban fighter to buy protection for his family. She resisted. Her brother beat her while her father looked on. Her mother was unable or unwilling to intervene.

Nadia’s personal story is a thread that runs through Quilty’s account of the last chaotic days of a failed American nation-building exercise that began with an assault on al-Qaeda strongholds and ended in disaster.

America’s retaliation for al-Qaeda’s attack on the American homeland on September 11, 2001, had run its course in shambolic scenes from Karzai International Airport as desperate Afghans clung to the undercarriage of a departing aircraft, only to fall to their deaths.

In his own reconstruction of what happened in the last days of the American and NATO-supported regime in Kabul, Quilty takes us inside a military command post guarding the approaches to the capital where Captain Jalal Sulaiman was making a heroic stand against a Taliban encirclement.
Running low on ammunition and water, without the sort of air cover provided by the departed American and NATO forces, Sulaiman’s ability to withstand the Taliban advances crumbled.

As a professional soldier he had tried to make a fight of it, but the cause was hopeless. These scenes were repeated across Afghanistan as provincial capital after capital fell to the Taliban, often without a shot being fired.

The regime in Kabul, without American and NATO military support and with its own army unwilling to fight, had been exposed for what it was – an empty shell.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/from-future-lawyer-to-betrothed-to-a-taliban-fighter-august-in-kabul-shows-how-life-changed-overnight-for-so-many-in-afghanistan-188352