Taliban enter Kabul and demand SURRENDER: Islamists call for 'peaceful' handover of Afghan capital as fighters flood city and US embassy staff flee in helicopters - HOURS after marauding army seized Jalalabad just 80 miles away

Taliban fighters have entered Kabul with gunfire heard near the presidential palace as the extremists seized huge swathes of the country in the wake of the US military departure.

The militants were seen in the districts of Kalakan, Qarabagh and Paghman hours after taking control of Jalalabad, the most recent major Afghan city to fall to the insurgents.

The US evacuated diplomats from its embassy by helicopter as a Taliban spokesman said they were looking for a 'peaceful surrender' of the capital after meeting little resistance, while the British ambassador moved to a safe place to prepare for an evacuation.

They said: 'We don't want a single, innocent Afghan civilian to be injured or killed as we take charge of Kabul but we have not declared a ceasefire.'

The terror group added they do not intend to take Kabul 'by force' after entering the outskirts of the city.

An Afghan official earlier confirmed Jalalabad fell under Taliban control without a fight early Sunday morning when the governor surrendered, saying it was 'the only way to save civilian lives.'

Its fall has also given the Taliban control of a road leading to the Pakistan city of Peshawar, one of the main highways into landlocked Afghanistan.

Besides Kabul, just seven other provincial capitals out of the country's 34 are yet to fall to the Taliban after the military, which had been trained by the US, failed to stave off their attacks.

The Taliban are now closing in on the capital from all sides, controlling territories to the North, South, East and West and advancing to just seven miles south of the city.

Hoda Ahmadi, a lawmaker from Logar province, told The Associated Press that the Taliban have reached the Char Asyab district on the outskirts of the capital, which was gripped by blackouts, communications outages and street fighting overnight Saturday as the country descends into chaos.

A US defense official has warned it could be only a matter of days before the insurgent fighters take control of Kabul. Just last week, US intelligence estimates expected the city to be able to hold out for at least three months.

As the Taliban advance accelerates, the US is scrambling to evacuate more than 10,000 American citizens from the capital, with officials said to be trying to strike a deal for Taliban fighters not to descend on Kabul until the US can pull everyone out.

However, a senior US official told the New York Times the Taliban have warned the US it must cease airstrikes or else its extremist fighters will move in.

Joe Biden has vowed that any action that puts Americans at risk 'will be met with a swift and strong US military response.'

A Taliban fighter sits inside an Afghan National Army vehicle along the roadside in Laghman province on Sunday

Taliban fighters drive the vehicle through the streets of Laghman province Sunday - the same day Jalalabad fell

A Taliban fighter rides a motorbike through a street in Laghman province. A US defense official has warned it could be only a matter of days before the insurgent fighters take control of Kabul

Taliban fighters stand armed with guns in Laghman province after making major gains across Afghanistan in the wake of the US departure

The Taliban have now taken over Jalalabad, spelling the fall of the last major Afghan city other than Kabul to the extremist fighters as the US withdraws its troops from the country. Pictured Taliban forces patrol Herat Saturday

A US Chinook helicopter flies over the city of Kabul as diplomatic vehicles leave the compound after the Taliban advanced on the Afghan capital

The militants were seen in the districts of Kalakan, Qarabagh and Paghman hours after taking control of Jalalabad, the most recent major Afghan city to fall to the insurgents

Smoke rises next to the US Embassy in Kabul after Taliban fighters entered the outskirts of the Afghan capital

Biden's statement in full: 'I will not pass this war on to a fifth president'

'Over the past several days I have been in close contact with my national security team to give them direction on how to protect our interests and values as we end our military mission in Afghanistan.

First, based on the recommendations of our diplomatic, military, and intelligence teams, I have authorized the deployment of approximately 5,000 US troops to make sure we can have an orderly and safe drawdown of US personnel and other allied personnel and an orderly and safe evacuation of Afghans who helped our troops during our mission and those at special risk from the Taliban advance.

Second, I have ordered our armed forces and our intelligence community to ensure that we will maintain the capability and the vigilance to address future terrorist threats from Afghanistan.

Third, I have directed the Secretary of State to support President Ghani and other Afghan leaders as they seek to prevent further bloodshed and pursue a political settlement. Secretary Blinken will also engage with key regional stakeholders.

Fourth, we have conveyed to the Taliban representatives in Doha, via our Combatant Commander, that any action on their part on the ground in Afghanistan, that puts US personnel or our mission at risk there, will be met with a swift and strong US military response.

Fifth, I have placed Ambassador Tracey Jacobson in charge of a whole of government effort to process, transport, and relocate Afghan special immigrant visa applicants and other Afghan allies. Our hearts go out to the brave Afghan men and women who are now at risk. We are working to evacuate thousands of those who helped our cause and their families.

That is what we are going to do. Now let me be clear about how we got here.

America went to Afghanistan 20 years ago to defeat the forces that attacked this country on September 11th. That mission resulted in the death of Osama Bin Laden over a decade ago and the degradation of al Qaeda. And yet, 10 years later, when I became President, a small number of US troops still remained on the ground, in harm's way, with a looming deadline to withdraw them or go back to open combat.

Over our country's 20 years at war in Afghanistan, America has sent its finest young men and women, invested nearly $1 trillion dollars, trained over 300,000 Afghan soldiers and police, equipped them with state-of-the-art military equipment, and maintained their air force as part of the longest war in US history. One more year, or five more years, of US military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country's civil conflict was not acceptable to me.

When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on US forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew US forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies' forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country's civil conflict. I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.'

The fighters videoed themselves lounging on Dostum's gold furniture, posing in chairs and inspecting his golden tea set.

Meanwhile, videos from Kandahar showed Taliban fighters seizing grounded US-made Blackhawk helicopters and taking to the air in Russian aircraft after turning their crew.

Mazar-e-Sharif, the country's fourth largest city, fell Saturday despite Afghan forces and two powerful former warlords vowing to defend it.

The move handed the insurgents control over all of northern Afghanistan.

'The army is not fighting. It is only Atta Noor and (Marshal Abdul Rashid) Dostum's militias defending the city,' Mohammad Ibrahim Khairandesh, a former provincial council member who now lives in the city, told The New York Times.

'The situation is critical, and it's getting worse.'

'We are probably experiencing the most massive, brutal and opportunistic military campaign of violence and terror, by the Taliban, in the history of our country,' Afghan Foreign Minister Mohammed Haneef Atmar said at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute earlier this week.

The situation appears to be dire as insurgent forces tightened their grip around Kabul after warlords captured two more provinces on Saturday and moved within seven miles of the city.

Herds of civilians who escaped the violence flooded the streets of Kabul and set up camps while diplomats work with other countries to see who's willing to take in Afghan refugees.

The State Department is in talks with several other countries to house US-affiliated Afghan refugees, and Canada has already welcomed 20,000 Afghan refugees threatened by the Taliban, the IRCC - Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada - said in a Twitter statement.

So far, about 1,200 Afghans have been evacuated to the United States and that number is set to rise to 3,500 in the coming weeks under 'Operation Allies Refuge,' with some going to a U.S. military base in Virginia to finalize their paperwork and others directly to US hosts, Reuters reported.

A deal to house about 8,000 Afghans in Qatar, which hosts a large US military base, has been close for weeks, a US official told Reuters, although no official deal has been announced.

Afghan President Ghani addressed the nation in a minute-long video statement Saturday morning (US time) that was translated into English.

'Afghanistan is in serious danger of instability,' Ghani said.

'Though I know that you are worried about your current situation and your future, I assure you that as your president, my focus is prevent the expansion of instability, violence and displacement of my people,' Ghani said.

'As part of a historical mission, I will do my best to stop this imposed conflict on the Afghan people to result in further killing of innocent people, loss of your achievements of the last 20 years, destruction of public property and prolonged instability.'

He said he's engaging with Afghan and international leaders, and consultations are 'urgently ongoing and the results will soon be shared.'

This was his first public comment since the Taliban demanded he resign in exchange for a reduction in violence.

Between Friday and Saturday, the Taliban made major advances in what's already been an efficient takeover of the country.

They captured Herat and Kandahar, which are the country's second- and third-largest cities, as well as the Logar province, just south of Kabul.

The Taliban continued its swift movement towards Kabul by capturing Mazar-i-Sharif.

Refugees flooded the Kabul in recent days as the Taliban continues to circle the city

Diplomats are working with other countries to see who's willing to take in Afghan refugees who had to flee their homes

Longest war: Were America's decades in Afghanistan worth it?

Here's what 19-year-old Lance Cpl. William Bee felt flying into southern Afghanistan on Christmas Day 2001: purely lucky. The U.S. was hitting back at the al-Qaida plotters who had brought down the World Trade Center, and Bee found himself among the first Marines on the ground.

'Excitement,' Bee says these days, of the teenage Bee's thoughts then. 'To be the dudes that got to open it up first.'

In the decade that followed, three more deployments in America's longest war scoured away that lucky feeling.

For Bee, it came down to a night in 2008 in Afghanistan's Helmand province. By then a sergeant, Bee held the hand of an American sniper who had just been shot in the head, as a medic sliced open the man's throat for an airway.

'After that it was like, you know what — 'F**k these people,'' Bee recounted, of what drove him by his fourth and final Afghan deployment. 'I just want to bring my guys back. That's all I care about. I want to bring them home.'

As President Joe Biden ends the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan this month, Americans and Afghans are questioning whether the war was worth the cost: more than 3,000 American and other NATO lives lost, tens of thousands of Afghans dead and trillions of dollars of U.S. debt that generations of Americans will pay for. Afghanistan, after a week of stunning Taliban advances, appears at imminent threat of falling back under Taliban rule, just as Americans found it nearly 20 years ago.

For Biden, for Bee and for some of the American principals in the U.S. and NATO war in Afghanistan, the answer to whether it was worth the cost often comes down to parsing.

There were the first years of the war, when Americans broke up Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida in Afghanistan and routed the Taliban government that had hosted the terrorist network.

That succeeded.

The proof is clear, says Douglas Lute, White House czar for the war during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, and a retired lieutenant general: Al-Qaida hasn't been able to mount a major attack on the West since 2005.

'We have decimated al-Qaida in that region, in Afghanistan and Pakistan,' Lute says.

But after that came the grinding second phase of the war. US fears of a Taliban rebound whenever Americans eventually pulled out meant that service members such as Bee kept getting sent back in, racking up more close calls, injuries and dead comrades.

Lute and some others argue that what the second half of the war bought was time — a grace period for Afghanistan's government, security forces and civil society to try to build enough strength to survive on their own.

Quality of life in some ways did improve, modernizing under the Western occupation, even as the millions of dollars the U.S. poured into Afghanistan fed corruption. Infant mortality rates fell by half. In 2005, fewer than 1 in 4 Afghans had access to electricity. By 2019, nearly all did.

The second half of the war allowed Afghan women, in particular, opportunities entirely denied them under the fundamentalist Taliban, so that more than 1 in 3 teenage girls — their whole lives spent under the protection of Western forces — today can read and write.

But it's that longest, second phase of the war that looks on the verge of complete failure now.

The U.S. war left the Taliban undefeated and failed to secure a political settlement. Taliban forces this past week have swept across two-thirds of the country and captured provincial capitals, on the path of victory before U.S. combat forces even complete their pullout. On many fronts, the Taliban are rolling over Afghan security forces that U.S. and NATO forces spent two decades working to build.

This swift advance sets up a last stand in Kabul, where most Afghans live. It threatens to clamp the country under the Taliban's strict interpretation of religious law, erasing much of the gains.

'There's no 'mission accomplished,'' Biden snapped last month, batting down a question from a reporter.

Biden quickly corrected himself, evoking the victories of the first few years of the war. 'The mission was accomplished in that we ... got Osama bin Laden, and terrorism is not emanating from that part of the world,' he added.

Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for Central Asia during much of the war's first decade, says the criticism was largely not of the conflict itself but because it went on so long.

'It was the expansion of war aims, to try to create a government that was capable of stopping any future attacks,' Boucher said.

America expended the most lives, and dollars, on the most inconclusive years of the war.

The strain of fighting two post-9/11 wars at once with an all-volunteer military meant that more than half of the 2.8 million American servicemen and women who deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq served two or more times, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University.

The repeated deployments contributed to disability rates in those veterans that are more than double that of Vietnam veterans, says Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University.

Bilmes calculates the U.S. will spend more than $2 trillion just caring for and supporting Afghanistan and Iraq veterans as they age, with costs peaking 30 years to 40 years from now.

That's on top of $1 trillion in Pentagon and State Department costs in Afghanistan since 2001. Because the U.S. borrowed rather than raised taxes to pay for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, interest payments are estimated to cost succeeding generations of Americans trillions of dollars more still.

Annual combat deaths peaked around the time of the war's midpoint, as Obama tried a final surge of forces to defeat the Taliban. In all, 2,448 American troops, 1,144 service members from NATO and other allied countries, more than 47,000 Afghan civilians and at least 66,000 Afghan military and police died, according to the Pentagon and to the Costs of War project.

All the while, a succession of U.S. commanders tried new strategies, acronyms and slogans in fighting a Taliban insurgency.

Kandahar's airstrip, where Bee was quickly put to work digging a foxhole for himself over Christmas 2001, grew into a post for tens of thousands of NATO troops, complete with Popeyes and Burger Kings and a hockey rink.

Over the years, fighting forces such as Bee's 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit moved into hot spots to fight the Taliban and build ties with local leaders, often only to see gains lost when their unit rotated out again. In Helmand province, which proved the turning point for Bee in 2008, hundreds of U.S. and other NATO forces died fighting that way. Taliban fighters recaptured the province on Friday.

Bee's Afghanistan tours finally ended in 2010, when an improvised explosive device exploded 4 feet from him, killing two fellow service members who had been standing with him. It was Bee's third head injury, and for a time left him unable to walk a block without falling down.

Was it worth it?

'The people whose lives we affected, I personally think we did them better, that they're better off for it,' answered Bee. who lives in Jacksonville, North Carolina. He now works for a company that provides autonomous robots for Marine training at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune and is co-writing a book about his time in Afghanistan.

'But I also wouldn't trade a handful of Afghan villages for one Marine,' he added.

Ask the same question in Afghanistan, though, and you get different answers.

Some Afghans — asked that question before the Taliban's stunning sweep last week — respond that it's more than time for Americans to let Afghans handle their own affairs.

But one 21-year-old woman, Shogufa, says American troops' two decades on the ground meant all the difference for her.

The Associated Press is using her first name only, given fears of Taliban retribution against women who violate their strict codes.

When still in her infancy, she was pledged to marry a much older cousin in the countryside to pay off a loan. She grew up in a family, and society, where few women could read or write.

But as she grew up, Shogufa came across a Western mountaineering nonprofit that had come to Kabul to promote fitness and leadership for Afghan girls. It was one of a host of such development groups that came to Afghanistan during the U.S.-led war.

Shogufa thrived. She scaled steps hacked out of the ice in an Afghan-girl attempt on Afghanistan's highest mountain, an unthinkable endeavor under the Taliban and still controversial today. She deflected her family's moves to marry her off to her cousin. She got a job and is pursuing a bachelor's degree in business administration.

For Shogufa today, the gratitude for what she's gained is shadowed by her fears of all that she stands to lose.

Her message to Americans, as they left and the Taliban closed in on Kabul? 'Thank you for everything you have done in Afghanistan,' she said, in good but imperfect English. 'The other thing was to request that they stay with us.'

Source: The Associated Press

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