An Afghan National Army soldier keeps watch from a check post at Mahipar, on Jalalabad-Kabul highway Afghanistan on July 8 2021. Picture: REUTERS/MOHAMMAD ISMAIL
Gorbachev was also conscious of a certain dignity issue. “He said several times that we cannot just pull up our pants and make a run for it, like Americans in Vietnam,” his foreign policy adviser Anatoly Chernyaev recalled in 2009. And yet the more things seem different, the more they stay the same. The spotless Soviet garrison town in Jalalabad was looted hours after the Russians left, and “all the more or less valuable property — televisions, audio equipment, air conditioners, furniture, even army beds — was sold through the city’s market stalls,” Gromov wrote. The same happened to Bagram minutes after the Americans went — looters went in and grabbed anything they could find of value.
When the Taliban emerged as a righteous force pledging to end warlords’ internecine fighting and seized control of Kabul in 1996, they hanged Najibullah, by then long out of power; Afghan leaders who co-operated with the US could well face the same fate if they fail to flee.