Leaving Afghanistan (Pt 2): Handing victory to the Taliban
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 27 July 2021
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Veteran Times war correspondent Anthony Loyd hits the road with Afghan security forces… and meets the Taliban.
The second of two episodes this week looking back at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, and forward to the country’s uncertain future.
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Guest: Anthony Loyd, foreign correspondent, The Times.
Host: Manveen Rana.
Manveen's August 2020 interview with the president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, is available here.
Clips: CNN, BBC, ABC News, Reuters, DW News, MSNBC, Al Jazeera.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Imagine sweeping through green fields, floating five feet above ground, sun on your face as you slide by on track to your destination, not a car in the world, as you simply lean back. |
| 0:17.0 | And before you know it, you're there. |
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| 1:04.0 | It was a surreal image. |
| 1:08.0 | Last Tuesday, in the sun-dappled grounds of Afghanistan's presidential palace, some of the most senior politicians in the country were marking the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adhar. |
| 1:25.0 | The president and members of government continued to pray, despite a hail of rockets landing nearby. |
| 1:38.0 | ISIS said they'd launch the attack. The Afghan government blamed the Taliban. |
| 1:49.0 | Either way, there's a growing sense that control is slipping away. |
| 1:54.0 | As the last NATO forces withdraw after 20 years, Afghanistan could be weeks from chaos. |
| 2:04.0 | You're listening to stories of our times from the times in the Sunday Times. I'm Manvin Rana. |
| 2:10.0 | Today, leaving Afghanistan, part two, handing victory to the Taliban. |
| 2:20.0 | Believe me, it's not like I got it all right. It was only in later years that I saw it going horribly wrong. |
| 2:25.0 | Yesterday, in part one, the Times' veteran war correspondent, Anthony Lloyd, looked back over 25 years of reporting from Afghanistan. |
| 2:34.0 | And in the kind of notion now that, well, we, we being the British, or our allies, the Americans, were tactically brilliant or tactically victorious, but politically defeated, is absolutely a false notion. |
| 2:46.0 | Our armies indulged in both tactical level and strategic level in a policy which ensured their ultimate defeat. |
| 2:54.0 | Today, with the last NATO forces due to leave next month, we're looking ahead to the country's future. |
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