Jonathan Marcus
Diplomatic analyst

The Biden administration's rush for the exit in Afghanistan has been accompanied by a similar rush to judgement - many castigating the US president for a decision seen as unnecessary and a betrayal.

Comparisons are being made with Vietnam- the similarities with helicopters shuttling US nationals away from a falling city being too much for the newspaper front pages to resist. But in reality - despite the superficial similarities - there are some important differences, too.

Crucially, today's international context is dramatically different from that of the 1970s. The US - indeed the West in general - is engaged in multiple contests, in few of which they are outright winners.

Those of Washington's allies who joined in the Afghanistan project are smarting. They feel badly let down.

And that's what really matters - the ramifications among Washington's allies. What will they take away from the Afghan experience?

Beyond the immediate crisis, will the Nato countries, Israel, Taiwan, South Korea or Japan see the US as a less reliable partner? If they do, then Mr Biden's decision to quit Afghanistan will prove fateful, indeed.

Image source, Getty Images

Mina al-Lami
Jihadist Media Specialist, BBC Monitoring

Jihadists are watching and waiting to see if the Taliban will establish an Islamic state run by Sharia law, and how genuine and strict such a Sharia state would be.

In the meantime jihadists, with the exception of the Islamic State group (IS), continue to cheer the Taliban’s “historic victory” - seeing it as an overall benefit to jihadists and Islamist movements worldwide.

The Taliban have acquired a mythical status as a small group that rose from the ashes and captured a US/Nato-backed country within a few weeks. Still, fault lines amongst jihadists are appearing.

Some of the Taliban’s foreign policy, such as their positive messaging to neighbours and regional players, including China, and their claim of wanting to establish an inclusive government that represents all, does not sit well with hardliners, including supporters of al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, IS, which is a staunch rival of the Taliban, is the odd one out. The group has continued to claim small attacks on the Taliban, calling them an “apostate militia”.

IS is incensed by the gains made by its rival and will likely do all it can to spoil the Taliban’s effort to establish stability under their rule. The two groups are unlikely to work together, and the Taliban do not need IS, a much smaller group with limited resources in Afghanistan.

IS supporters are now widely commenting on events in Afghanistan. The dominant argument they make is that the Taliban are an agent of the US and that the US has handed over Afghanistan to the Taliban through a political deal.

There’s also a lot of squabbling among supporters of the Syria-based jihadist group HTS and supporters of al-Qaeda over whether HTS and the Taliban are similar.

Al-Qaeda and its supporters consider HTS a sell-out that turned its back on jihad. HTS supporters accuse al-Qaeda of double standards: praising the Taliban's political moves but condemning HTS when it pursues similar tactics, such as assuring the West it will not target its countries.

And the main question on many people's mind is this: have the Taliban really changed?

Home Secretary Priti Patel has told the BBC that UK officials are working "around the clock" to evacuate British and eligible Afghan nationals out of the country.

"We have been getting out approximately 1,000 people so far a day," she told BBC Breakfast.

She told the BBC that the UK is involved in an "enormous effort" but described a "challenging" and "fluid situation".

She also spoke about the announcement that the UK will take in up to 20,000 Afghan refugees in the coming years.

She defended the initial target of resettling 5,000 within the first year and said she had spoken with international partners - including the US and Canada - about how governments can work together.

Image source, PA Media

Manish Pandey
Newsbeat reporter

Image source, PARWIZ KARIMI

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan may be happening more than 3,600 miles away from the UK, but for British-Afghans, it feels much closer to home.

24-year-old Parwiz Karimi was born and grew up in Afghanistan before coming to the UK as an asyulm seeker.

His childhood memories include being confronted by armed Taliban members who would cross into his village, with his grandmother telling him and his siblings to "run to the mountains" to find safety.

Fast forward to today, he feels guilty and worried about his many family members who still live there.

"I'm here sitting in my house peacefully studying. And they're struggling to find food," he tells Radio 1 Newsbeat.

"There is so much I can do here but at the same time, there's nothing I can do for them."

Find out more about Parwiz' story here.

Image source, Reuters

There are reports that the Taliban's political leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and other leaders are expected to arrive in the capital Kabul either today or tomorrow.

Baradar was among several members of the Taliban's senior leadership who returned home on Tuesday. They had travelled from Qatar to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, their spiritual birthplace.

Baradar, one of the founding members of the Taliban, had been part of the negotiations with the US in Qatar after being released from prison to help facilitate the peace process.

He was captured in a joint US-Pakistani operation in Karachi in 2010.

Image source, Getty Images

More than 2,200 diplomats and other civilians have so far been evacuated from Afghanistan on military flights, a Western security official told Reuters news agency on Wednesday.

Early this morning 131 people landed in Frankfurt. They had been evacuated from Kabul to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, where they then boarded a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt chartered by the German government.

German airline Lufthansa said it would carry out more such flights in the next few days, said a Deutsche Welle report.

Separately, a Dutch C-17 transport plane departed Kabul with 40 people on board, said the country's Ministry of Defense.

However, no Dutch or Afghans were said to be on board.

A Dutch Afghan citizen has described how his family tried to get to the airport but were barred from entry by US guards at one of the gates. The man had been visiting family with his wife and two children when the Taliban took over Kabul.

He told the Dutch public broadcaster NOS: " The Americans [were] guarding the gate. I showed them my passport and said that I was Dutch. There was a lot of noise, I couldn't hear very well everything the American was saying. After I said three times that I was Dutch, he said that I had to stand back or he would shoot. I decided to leave. I didn't want to risk being shot."

Image source, Getty Images

The leaders of the Taliban will show themselves to the world with "no shadow of secrecy", a senior official told news agency Reuters.

It is in direct contrast to the past 20 years, when its leaders lived largely in hiding.

We're seeing some signs of their new direction - on Tuesday for example, spokesman Zabihullah Majahid showed up at the Taliban's first news conference since the takeover. Journalists were shocked to see the face of a man who had for years operated only in the shadows.

The senior official also told Reuters that Taliban members had been ordered not to celebrate their recent sweep of the country, and added that civilians should hand over weapons and ammunition.

Frances Mao
BBC News, Sydney

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Australia has evacuated 26 people on its first military flight out of Afghanistan, on a plane that can carry 128 people.

Among them were Australian citizens, Afghans with approved visas and one foreign official.

More flights are due, but Human Rights Watch called Australia’s effort “disappointing” in the wake of other Western nations' efforts to evacuate desperate Afghans.

Despite widespread concern among the Australian public for the Afghan people, Mr Morrison told the nation on Wednesday his government would not be taking in extra refugees.

The UK and Canada have both pledged to take in an extra 20,000 Afghans, but Mr Morrison said: “Australia is not going into that territory”.

He said its intake would follow its existing UN obligations, with Afghan visas to be capped at 3,000.

He also reiterated Australia’s overall hardline attitude to refugees saying: “We will not be allowing people to enter Australia illegally even at this time”. Officials would be stepping up efforts to “check the bona fides of individual applicants”, he said.

International law dictates that seeking asylum is a human right, but Australia classifies those who arrive outside the UN's refugee programme as "illegals".

This mainly applies to boat asylum seekers, many of whom have come from Afghanistan in the past decade.

Mr Morrison said those Afghans who remain held in Australia’s detention system will continue to be denied the right to permanently settle.

As Afghanistan adjusts to its new reality, there have been signs of life cautiously resuming in the capital Kabul.

When the Taliban took the city and militants poured in on Sunday, there were multiple reports of Kabul becoming a ghost town with shuttered shops and deserted streets.

But since yesterday more have been venturing out. This morning, one Al-Jazeera journalist tweeted saying he saw some shops and restaurants re-opening - but not that many women on the streets.

Another Kabul-based journalist said that a familiar sound of the city has returned.

In the past 20 years, life for many people in Afghanistan has steadily gotten better - with women seeing some of the biggest changes.

The fall of the Taliban regime allowed some significant change and progress in terms of women's rights and education.

Back in 1999, there was not a single girl enrolled in a secondary school and only 9,000 were in primary schools.

There are now 3.5 million girls who go to school, and around a third of students at public and private universities are women.

Women have also been participating in public life, holding political office and pursuing business opportunities.

It's not clear how all this may change.

The Taliban have promised that women would enjoy rights according to sharia, or Islamic law. They also say that they no longer oppose girls' education.

But according to Human Rights Watch, very few Taliban officials in the areas they control actually allow girls to attend school past puberty.

Jon Sopel
BBC North America Editor

US President Joe Biden's election campaign could be boiled down to three messages to distinguish himself from Donald Trump.

First, he would be more empathetic. He would be more competent. And instead of "America First", it would be replaced by the mantra "America is back".

But in his address yesterday, there wasn't a whole lot of empathy towards the thousands of Afghans who've helped Americans these past 20 years. On competence, even his biggest cheerleaders would struggle to say the withdrawal of American troops has been anything other than shambolic.

And after the bewildering events of the past few days, how exactly is America back?

Many see what has unfolded on President Biden's watch in Afghanistan as a linear continuation of Donald Trump's America First policies - and, as some have joked cruelly, not as well organised.

That is potentially deeply damaging.

Read more about the other ways in which the crisis has hurt Biden here.

Image source, Getty Images

George Wright
BBC News

Image source, Reuters

For years he has operated in the shadows, only a voice on the end of the phone.

But on Tuesday that changed when spokesman Zabihullah Majahid appeared at the Taliban's first news conference.

The BBC's Yalda Hakim says she was "shocked" to see the face of a man she had been speaking to for more than a decade, answering the first question from a female journalist.

But Ms Hakim says this is a far cry from some of the messages she used to receive from him.

"Some of these texts were hardcore Islamist texts. Some of those you think: 'This guy is bloodthirsty for the Americans, he's bloodthirsty for anyone in the Afghan government.' Then today he sits there and says there will be no reprisals," she says.

"For years he has sent out these bloodthirsty statements and now he's suddenly peace loving? It's hard to reconcile."

More on Zabihullah Majahid here.

India has evacuated its ambassador and all other diplomats from Taliban, with all of them having flown out in a special military flight on Tuesday.

The aircraft carrying around 150 people, including diplomats, officials, security personnel and some stranded Indians, landed at the Hindon airbase near the capital Delhi in the evening.

India's foreign minister, S Jaishankar called the evacuation process a "difficult and complicated" exercise.

India's ambassador to Afghanistan Rudrendra Tandon said there are still some Indians stuck in Afghanistan who will be evacuated when commercial flight services resume.

"That is why Air India will continue to run its commercial services to Kabul as long as the airport in Kabul functions," Mr Tandon told news agency PTI.

Read more about the situation here.

Image source, Getty Images

The Taliban has promised that civilians can travel safely to Kabul airport, said the White House on Tuesday, according to an AFP report.

About 11,000 US nationals remain inside the country, including contractors and diplomats, according to the US government.

Officials said they were in contact with Taliban commanders to ensure that flights at Hamid Karzai International Airport remained safe from attack and that citizens and locals looking to leave had safe passage.

There have been reports that Afghans are being harassed or beaten by Taliban guards as they try to enter the airport.

Pictures emerged yesterday showing people, including children, with blood running down their faces.

Separately, Canada said it plans to resume military fights to Afghanistan to evacuate Afghans who "are at risk due to their close and enduring relationship with Canada", a Canadian Armed Forces spokesperson told Reuters in a statement.

Former US vice-president Mike Pence has joined in the criticism of the American pullout from Afghanistan, with an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal., external

Calling it a "a foreign-policy humiliation unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis", Mr Pence claimed President Joe Biden had broken a deal that the previous administration had made with the Taliban.

The deal, Mr Pence said, was to gradually withdraw from Afghanistan as long as the Taliban ended attacks on US personnel, refused terrorists safe harbour, and negotiated with Afghan leaders on creating a new government.

Mr Pence claimed that Mr Biden broke this deal by announcing that US forces would remain in Afghanistan for several more months, and that this prompted the Taliban to launch their offensive.

But some have already begun rebutting this characterisation of events. Academic and journalist Thomas Joscelyn has pointed out that the Taliban failed to fulfill some conditions as well, though he did agree that the militants mostly refrained from attacking Americans.

More on Donald Trump's Fox News interview: the former US president also criticised Joe Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan, and took a potshot at crossings at the US-Mexico border which have recently hit a two-decade high.

"Biden, look at what he's done to the southern border... this [situation in Afghanistan] is like the southern border but handled even worse. No one handled the southern border worse than him, well Afghanistan is the exact same thing," he said.

Mr Trump also claimed he would have handled the withdrawal differently.

"I took the [US army in Afghanistan] down from close to 20,000 to 2,500 [soldiers] - and [now they're taking] the military out before we took our civilians out and the interpreters and other people... that helped us. Now what we were going to do was take the military out last - the people were going to come out [first]," he said.

In an exclusive interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity that's just aired in the US, former president Donald Trump called the decision to go into Afghanistan the "worst decision in the history of our country".

"We've destroyed the Middle East... it cost us trilllions of dollars, millions of lives and it's no different than it was - it's much worse because you have to rebuild it, it's been blown to pieces," he said.

"To get stuck in there was like quicksand."

BBC Radio 5 Live

An Afghan woman living in Kabul has spoken about her fears after the Taliban arrived.

Hena (not her real name) lives in the city and hasn’t been to work since the Taliban took control.

“They don’t have any belief in values, they are killing, it is no matter for them,” she said.

Speaking to Patrick Kielty on BBC Radio 5 Live Breakfast, Hena also spoke about the responsibility she feels to tell people her story.

“I should share information, I should speak with the international media to tell the truth,” she said.

You can listen to 5 Live on the free BBC Sounds app.

Vikas Pandey
BBC News, Delhi

The Taliban's quick takeover of Afghanistan is likely to cause a significant shift in the geopolitics of South Asia- and could be particularly testing for India, given India's historically tense relations and border disputes with Pakistan and China.

The biggest challenge India will face is whether to recognise the Taliban government or not. The decision will get tough, especially if Moscow and Beijing decide to acknowledge the Taliban government in some form.

India's best option at the moment seems to be keeping a channel of communication open.

According to Amlendu Misra, a professor of politics at Lancaster University and the author of a book on Afghanistan, there are no good options for Delhi. "There are bad and then there are worse options," he said.

Read more about India's situation here.

Image source, EPA