On Saturday again, Ashraf Ghani attended a meeting on security in Kabul, at a reasonable distance from the Taliban in full territorial reconquest.
Would the speed of their progress have surprised him as much as the international community?
According to his rival and former vice-president Abdullah Abdullah, the Afghan president has in any case left the country in recent hours, when the Taliban have started to enter the capital.
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"The former Afghan president has left the nation," said Abdullah, who is also the head of the High Council for National Reconciliation, in a video posted on his Facebook page.
Information, however, not confirmed for the moment by the main interested party.
A failed president
Ghani, 72, was elected in 2014 on the promise to redress Afghanistan and end the corruption that plagued the country.
But the mandate of this former economist will have allowed neither one nor the other, Ghani even ending up losing his privileged relation with the United States, until the departure of the American soldiers.
All his peace offers, with the exception of an ephemeral ceasefire in June 2018, marking the end of Ramadan, have been refused by the rebels, who call his government a “puppet” of Washington.
Ghani had called for fighting the Taliban “for generations” if peace talks were to fail, in a country that went to war more than 40 years ago.
Isolated over time, he ended up losing the battle against the Taliban.
His flight, probably for fear of reprisals, would in any case record the takeover of power by the Islamist rebels.