Even the Taliban are in shock: my week on the Kabul front line

I’ve been to the front line in Iraq, Syria and Libya and witnessed all kinds of crazy, unlikely events. But I have never seen anything like what’s happening in Kabul. Only two weeks ago, I was reporting for CNN in the city of Kandahar. It was clear that this provincial capital would not be the last to fall. Then on Sunday morning, we heard that the Taliban were at the gates of Kabul itself. In the afternoon, we heard that they had entered the city. By the evening, Taliban fighters were manning checkpoints on every street corner, wielding guns but not using them. How on earth did they take a capital city of six million in a matter of hours while hardly firing a shot? The Afghan army was never a coherent force in the way that the Taliban is. I saw this for myself a few days ago on my way to Taliban territory in Ghazni.