What went wrong in Afghanistan

A circle has come full circle: 20 years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Kabul fell - and in retrospect the big tones of that time seem stale: Back then, western nations wanted their values, the good in the world, almost heroically united against it Evil defend the al-Qaeda terrorists and the Taliban.

This was followed by a multi-billion dollar development mission to convert Afghanistan into a democracy.

That went wrong.

At the end of a week of Afghanistan coverage, at the end of a week after the Taliban conquered Kabul, there are no more heroes left in the focus of international politics.

Not in the USA, which left the country too quickly and too haphazardly.

Not in Germany, where it seems more important to put the fear of waves of refugees before everything else in the election campaign, instead of allowing your own mistakes to be followed by upright deeds.

more on the subject

• Foreign Minister Maas on the failure in Afghanistan: "I don't know whether this can even be cured" A SPIEGEL interview by Melanie Amann and Christoph Schult

• Internal documents: How Europe wants to seal itself off from Afghan refugeesBy Giorgos Christides, Steffen Lüdke and Maximilian Popp

• Social networks in Afghanistan: After Trump come the Taliban by Patrick Beuth and Muriel Kalisch

• Protocol of the German failure in Afghanistan: »Takeover of Kabul before September 11th is rather unlikely«

Above this particular episode of "Eight Billion" there is the question of what is happening in and with Afghanistan and how it could have happened that the western world only has one thing in common on this issue: The attempt to take all responsibility for the disastrous fall of the country and the looming one To deny disaster for the people there or to hand it over to other states.

Host Olaf Heuser talks about this with SPIEGEL correspondent Christoph Reuter, who knows the country better than few others - he lived in Kabul for years.

You can hear the current episode of the podcast here: