AFGHANISTAN

PEPE ESCOBAR—ISIS-K, which sports a global jihadi mindset, has typically viewed the Taliban as a group of dirty nationalists. Earlier jihadi members used to be recruited from the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Yet now, apart from former soldiers, they are mostly young, disaffected urban Afghans, westernized by trashy pop culture.

It’s been hard for ISIS-K to establish the narrative that the Taliban are western collaborators – considering that the NATO galaxy continues to antagonize and/or dismiss the new rulers of Kabul.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—There are a lot of warmongers rending their garments over the termination of a decades-long military occupation which accomplished nothing besides making war profiteers wealthy and killing hundreds of thousands of people. Almost as ridiculous are the countless pundits and politicians hailing this as some kind of major accomplishment that Americans should be proud of. Pride, praise and celebration are not the appropriate emotional response to the day. The appropriate response to a decades-overdue withdrawal from a war that should never have happened in the first place is rage.

WILLIAM HATHAWAY—The USA invaded with a massive land and air assault, conquered Kabul, and installed a figurehead president who had previously worked for the US company that wanted to build the pipeline. He was their guy, and the pipeline was at the top of his agenda.

The Taliban merged back into the rural population, where they have deep roots. To find and kill them, the USA and its NATO partners unleashed a campaign of terror – house raids by death squads (an old CIA card), brutal interrogations, drone strikes, infantry sweeps – that divided the rural population into two groups – the dead and the determined.

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After nearly 20 years of fighting against the US in Afghanistan, the victorious Taliban posed with captured American gear at the Kabul airport, held a mock funeral for NATO in Khost, and flew a Black Hawk helicopter over Kandahar.

The last US troops left the Hamid Karzai International Airport on Monday, just before the clock struck midnight local time. On Tuesday morning, Taliban fighters strolled through the airport they now controlled, littered with debris, posing for photos with the captured vehicles, aircraft and equipment.