Just one look at the images on any television in the world will show the ordeal at Kabul airport, where tens of thousands of people are waiting to leave the country. Women and children for the most part, but also many men fearful of what might happen to them under the Taliban regime, as they search for a plane that will allow them safe passage to leave Afghanistan.
International images are concentrated on this airport while news from the capital and different towns speak of a tense calm although, obviously, there is no reason for optimism. Sooner or later, as everyone knows, a relentless persecution of those who have collaborated with the West over the last two decades will be unleashed. This is a prelude to very bad times.
It is true that at this time news coming out of Afghanistan contain very inaccurate information. Because whether admitted or not, it is a real war zone, and the first thing to suffer, as always, is the truth. The way in which the United States has withdrawn, the proactive and humanitarian but always scant role of the European Union, the silence of China waiting for its moment in this whole story and the classic international dinosaurs — the UN, above all— overwhelmed by the events, paint a worrying picture of what is to come, which will undoubtedly be dramatic.
Only in one area in the north of the country, the Panjshir valley, there is a minimally organised resistance that seems willing to fight the Taliban. Elsewhere, control is absolute and the Taliban deadline for the US to leave the country will not be extended beyond August 31st.
The Taliban spokesperson has been adamant that there will be no extension of the deadline, as they took steps to stop the flood of people trying to reach the airfield. At this stage it is impossible to know how many thousands of people will be left to their fate around the airport. With seven days to go before the deadline, the chaos and the slowness of the planes evacuating civilians does not allow for optimism.
Tuesday's G7 emergency meeting showed that at this stage the Western powers have very little room for manoeuvre, and that Joe Biden is a president overtaken by the events. The humiliating departure of the United States, apparently following an agreement with the Taliban about which very little is known, is already the most serious international crisis ever for a president in the first few months of his arrival to the White House. The cost to his image, both domestically and internationally, is enormous and his prestige is unlikely to recover in a society so unaccustomed to humiliations of this magnitude.