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Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots and Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and Isbaugh Hartman.

Afghanistan is now effectively controlled by the Taliban.

Kabul has been taken and there is chaos at the airport as both diplomats and Afghans

tried to flee.

Fraser, can you just keep us up to date of the developments over the weekend?

It's funny how much has happened over the two days of the weekend.

I mean, even yesterday, Sunday morning, started with the Americans saying to the Taliban,

look, can you guys wait two weeks until we get an interim government sorted out so we can

then basically hand over power to you.

But no, the Taliban didn't want to wait.

By Sunday afternoon, there were reports that they had entered the city of Kabul.

And by Sunday evening, there were pictures of them Taliban officials sitting in the offices

of the Afghan president, who, like pretty much every other major diplomat has now fled Kabul.

So you've ended up with the extraordinary

sight of this Afghan army of 300,000 people, 30,000 special forces, trained by the Americans

NATO allies over 20 years, not even being a presence in the streets when the Taliban came to

seize Kabul, which was the last part of their

Afghan jigsaw, they now pretty much run the whole country. So we have then seen a really

rather stunning change in political position. We've spent most of the last 20 years being told

that the Taliban were pretty much on a par with the Islamic State, that the Brits and the Americans who gave their life fighting in Helmand, they were

...