Defying the Dragon: Hong Kong and the World’s Largest Dictatorship

 Emma H. Zhang reviews Stephen Vines’s uncompromising critique of Hong Kong’s new political terrain.

Stephen Vines, Defying the Dragon: Hong Kong and the World’s Largest Dictatorship (Hurst & Company, 2021), 393pp.

“Leave? Certainly not. This Brit is staying” wrote journalist Stephen Vines in July 1997. Vines had given up his full-time position at the Observer in London to be stationed in Hong Kong on a part-time basis in 1987. At the time of the Handover, Vines had been living and working in Hong Kong as a journalist and businessman for ten years. He had faith in the people of Hong Kong, in the energy and audacity of the city. He believed that it was “foolish to jump before being pushed,” referring to those who had made plans to leave the city before the governance of the territory was returned to China. Vines kept his resolution and stayed in Hong Kong for another 24 years, constantly reporting on the business, finance, and politics of this city for a wide range of local and international media outlets. In 2021, he paid homage to the people of Hong Kong with his new book, Defying the Dragon: Hong Kong and the World’s Largest Dictatorship. In August, two months after the book’s publication, Vines ended his 34-year-long sojourn in the city and departed for London.

Defying the Dragon can be considered a sequel to Vines’s 1999 book, Hong Kong: China’s New Colony. For all those who doubted Vines’s judgment about China’s refusal to tolerate the pluralistic society of Hong Kong back in 1999, the events recorded in Defying the Dragon are an attempt to confirm Vines’s prophetic vision of the city. His book documents Hong Kong’s failure to preserve its existing freedoms despite the best efforts of its people. Vines argues that the root cause of Hong Kong’s vanishing liberties is its dysfunctional political system, which he says is manipulated by a small group of self-serving elites who do not adequately represent the people. To this end, Vines lays out an insider’s account of the increasing presence of Mainland authorities in Hong Kong’s political, judicial, business, and media sectors since the Handover.

The book consists of three parts. Part One offers an introduction and analysis of Hong Kong’s evolving relationship with mainland China and explains the historical, political, financial, and cultural factors that set the two societies on a course of collision. Part Two provides a detailed account of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, reporting on the events as they unfolded day-to-day. Part Three describes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on superpower politics and argues that the “oppression” of Hong Kong may become the catalyst for the eventual downfall of the Chinese Communist Party regime.

Books about the 2019 Hong Kong protest are numerous, some of the best known include Vigil (Feb. 2020) by Jeffery Wasserstrom, Unfree Speech (Feb. 2020) by Joshua Wong, City on Fire (Mar. 2020) by Antony Dapiran, Rebel City (May 2020) written by a team of journalists at the South China Morning Post, and Making Hong Kong China (Oct. 2020) by Michael C. Davis. Among them, City on Fire and Rebel City both provide detailed journalistic accounts of the cause, escalation, and aftermath of the protests, but the authors’ interpretations of the events are starkly different.

In this context, Vines’s book has little insight to add to the existing voices and narratives about the protest. Vines is characteristically blunt in his opinion and relentless in his portrayal of the politicians of whom he disapproves. He describes the territory’s Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, as someone who “appears to have had any scrap of charisma surgically removed; and is simply incapable of dealing with people who challenge her opinions” (53).

On the other hand, Vines celebrates Hong Kong people’s courage and ingenuity with zest. “Defying the dragon of the Chinese regime involves sacrifice and determination. Both are the qualities that have characterized the Hong Kong spirit and its incredible history of overcoming adversity” (294). Quoting Michael DeGlyer, who conducted public opinion surveys from 1989 to 2012, Vines points out that the notion that Hongkongers are politically apathetic is a myth. The problem is that they are “faced with a system that makes [political] participation very hard to achieve” (48). Vines argues that the post-Handover Hong Kong political system kept some of its worst heritage from the colonial area, but the new masters are even less tolerant of dissent.

Ultimately, Vines blames the undermining of Hong Kong’s autonomy on its self-serving elites. “It’s hard to find an example of any senior official prepared to stand up for Hong Kong’s interests in the face of Mainland pressure” (42). Vines describes the Hong Kong political system as “farcical” and argues that the legislative council gives only the appearance of legitimacy. The Election Committee responsible for selecting the Chief Executive cannot truly represent the will of most citizens, he claims. For example, in the 2017 Election Committee, the education sector had 80,643 voters, but held only 30 seats, whereas the agricultural and fishery sector had merely 154 voters yet held 60 uncontested seats. Carrie Lam, who won 777 votes from the 1,200 members of the Election Committee, “owes her position solely to the men in Beijing who installed her in office, and who can remove her any time they want to” (53), Vines asserts.

Vines also argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has deepened the internal and external crisis of the Chinese regime. It “had the effect of sowing doubt over the invincibility of the [Chinese] regime, as citizens slowly became aware that the pandemic was being covered up, and then started suffering from its dire economic impact” (203). Vines neglects to include that the pandemic has also seemingly strengthened state control in China and severely damaged people’s faith in democratic systems globally. The quarantine measures taken in Hong Kong eliminated mass gatherings, promptly ending the year-long protest. Vines acknowledges that “only a third of pro-democracy protests since 2010 have yielded any kind of success” (294), but he still holds out hope that the Hong Kong uprising will have a long-lasting impact like the Prague Spring – disturbances from the periphery can end up tumbling an entire regime, he reminds his reader.

And it will be those readers who appreciate Vines’s satirical humor, seething criticism of the powerful, and unwavering empathy for the oppressed who will enjoy this book the most. Although Vines’s account and analysis of the events is unapologetically subjective and unhesitatingly one-sided, he does take considerable time and care to make this book reach beyond his established fan base. The book’s content is supplemented by two appendices that list the timeline of events and note the key figures in Hong Kong politics. The book finishes with 32 pages of notes that cite a wide range of sources, and 22 pages of index. As if anticipating that his book will not find an outlet in local Hong Kong bookstores, Vines writes for an audience who is not so well informed about Hong Kong. As time passes, this book will serve to preserve the memory of the 2019 protest that is in danger of being obscured, as well as memorialize an era when journalists had the space to write and publish scathing criticisms against those in power without fear or reservation.

Dr. Emma H. Zhang is a lecturer of English at the College of International Education of Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests include comparative literature, comparative mythology, and e-learning. She has written on the subjects of contemporary Asian-American literature, Chinese mythology, as well as life writing.

Letter from the U.K.

Who Owns the Legacy of a Women’s Prison?

Activists want the site of a former correctional facility to honor history and provide social services. A real-estate developer wants to build apartments.

By Anna Russell 

The New Yorker

The sale of the London prison H.M.P. Holloway, which had come to be respected as a progressive institution, was controversial from the beginning.Photograph by Peter Marshall / Alamy





Pamela Stewart had been working as a psychotherapist at H.M.P. Holloway, a prison in London, for twenty years, in the fall of 2015, when she was suddenly called to the chapel for a mass announcement. As the officers and staff members filed into the large concrete space, she wondered if there had been a bombing, or if the Queen had died. Instead, she and her colleagues learned that Holloway, the largest women’s prison in Western Europe, was shutting down. The institution would close, the land would be put up for sale, and the more than five hundred inmates would be moved to other prisons, outside of London. Immediately, the officers around Stewart began to cry. “A massive personal, social, historical moment had come,” Stewart told me. “Everything that we’d learned, and built up, and were working toward, was about to be bulldozed.”

Soon afterward, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, announced the closure in Parliament. “Old Victorian prisons in our cities that are not suitable for rehabilitating prisoners will be sold,” he said. The proceeds would go toward building nine modern prisons. The announcement launched a flurry of articles in the British press. The BBC reported that the Prison Governors Association had “major concerns” about moving women out of Holloway. There was tittering speculation about the future of the site. “the lag of luxury,” one Daily Mail headline read. “infamous holloway prison which housed—and executed—some of britain’s most notorious female killers is to be sold off.”

Holloway opened its doors in 1852, on a ten-acre plot in an underdeveloped part of North London. The building resembled a medieval castle, with an imposing entrance arch flanked by stone griffins, and a foundation stone that read “May God preserve the City of London and make this place a terror to evil doers.” Originally intended for both sexes—Oscar Wilde stayed for a wretched month in 1895—the prison became women-only in the early nineteen-hundreds. In the years that followed, “royalty and socialites, spies and prostitutes, sporting stars and nightclub queens, Nazis and enemy aliens, terrorists and freedom fighters” all passed through Holloway’s halls, as Caitlin Davies writes in “Bad Girls: The Rebels and Renegades of Holloway Prison.” “Women were sentenced for treason and murder, for begging, performing abortions and stealing clothing coupons, for masquerading as men, running brothels and attempting suicide.”

In Holloway’s registry, it is possible to trace a history of social movements. In the nineteen-tens, the hottest story was the imprisonment and hunger-striking of militant suffragettes, including Emmeline Pankhurst. For these women, Davies points out, a visit to Holloway was a badge of honor: they made Holloway-themed brooches and Christmas cards. During the First World War, the prison held conscientious objectors. During the Second World War, Diana Mitford, who had married the head of the British Union of Fascists, was imprisoned on the grounds. Throughout the nineteen-eighties, nuclear-disarmament activists from Greenham Common were taken to Holloway repeatedly for disturbing the peace. (Their supporters climbed onto the prison’s roof in protest.) Five women were executed on the grounds, and many more died of other causes. Davies told me, “Every spot there tells a story in terms of the history of women, and crime and punishment.”

Despite the language of the announcement, by the time Holloway closed, it was no longer a Victorian prison. The castle had been torn down and rebuilt, in the seventies and eighties, along softer lines, to resemble a hospital. Its policies were increasingly progressive, for a prison. Some of the women lived in small groups around shared kitchenettes, worked in the garden, and took classes at the pottery studio. The facility had a gym and a swimming pool, a mother-and-baby unit, a team of therapists, a hairdresser, and a dentist. There were still problems: the building’s layout made it difficult to see around corners, and drug use and self-harm among prisoners were not uncommon. But Holloway had received good marks on its latest inspection, especially in mental-health services. The prison’s location, however, in central Islington, one of the city’s most popular boroughs, made the real estate valuable. The closure was all the more bewildering because H.M.P. Pentonville, a truly Victorian men’s prison nearby, which had recently been cited for overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, would remain open. But, as some critics noted, Pentonville was bigger, and its inmates more often violent; it seemed easier to move the women.

In the spring of 2016, the blocks at Holloway began emptying one by one. Two hundred women were moved to H.M.P. Downview, in Surrey, an hour outside of London. Some women were moved farther afield, to prisons in Staffordshire and Yorkshire, making visits from friends and family in London difficult. Many women were crammed into already full cells, in prisons without the services they were used to having at Holloway. The closure “pulled what I would call a village apart,” Jenny Seymour, a former prison officer at Holloway, told me. Around this time, an inmate created a painting that depicted the prison with a “For Sale” sign and a pirate flag. The stone griffins that once guarded the entrance to the old Victorian prison are lounging on clouds, playing cards. In the background, impossibly tall new apartment towers stretch into the sky.



he sale of Holloway was controversial from the beginning. It had come to be respected as a progressive institution, and many worried that it would be replaced by less-well-run prisons outside of London. Some also feared that its important political history would disappear with it. In May, 2017, an activist group called Sisters Uncut staged an occupation of the prison’s old visitors center, and demanded that the government use the land “to support survivors of domestic violence and the local community,” as a member, Nandini Archer, wrote in an op-ed in the Guardian. The activists climbed onto the roof, wearing T-shirts that read “This Is a Political Occupation,” and unrolled a banner printed in purple and green, the colors of the suffragettes: “Sisters Uncut have reclaimed this space for the community of Holloway.”

In the spring of 2019, the housing association Peabody bought the site for eighty-two million pounds, with plans to build a thousand new flats. The deal went through with the help of a forty-two-million-pound loan from a fund controlled by the mayor of London’s office. The terms of the loan required Peabody to offer sixty per cent of the new apartments as affordable housing. Islington Council issued a press release calling the deal a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to build “genuinely affordable housing for local people.” It would be one of the largest developments in Islington in decades.

Peabody also agreed to an unusual condition: it had to construct a women’s building on the grounds. Islington Council had stipulated, after input from activist groups, that any new development should attempt to replace the bevy of women’s services—therapy, job training, and more—that were lost from the borough when the prison closed. The council wrote that the development should provide “a women’s building/centre that incorporates safe space to support women in the criminal justice system,” as well as “services for women as part of a wider building.” The wording was a little vague, but activists hoped that the new building would offer services for the whole community, and memorialize the prison’s history, serving as its “living legacy.”





When Peabody released its draft proposal, there was an outcry. The plans called for apartments in several new tower blocks. Instead of a stand-alone structure, the “women’s building” had been relegated to the ground and basement floors of two apartment blocks. Peabody’s plans included fourteen hundred square metres of space, but Reclaim Holloway calculated that only three hundred and fifty square metres would be dedicated to women-focussed services; the rest was designated for general or flexible use. There also seemed to be little reference to Holloway’s status as a significant site in women’s history. “Why do women have to bend to the NEEDS of the Building,” Niki Gibbs, a member of Reclaim Holloway, wrote online, “rather than the building serving the NEEDS of women?”

Reclaim Holloway had released its own plans that envisioned a much larger stand-alone building, with suggestions for a ceramics studio for art therapy, like the one the prison had, and a floor each for employment and probation services. On the upper floors, they proposed counselling for domestic abuse and emergency women’s housing. “This building must have something special about it that is exciting and creative that makes it iconic and instantly recognisable,” Gibbs wrote. On Peabody’s plans, Reclaim Holloway marked the building by superimposing, on a small apartment block at the back of the complex, a glittering, rainbow-colored exterior.

One hot day in July, I rode my bike to Holloway. The prison is a blocky red-brick complex, with a distinctive wavy wall—meant to symbolize a breaking down of barriers between the prisoners and the community—along the perimeter. In the courtyard, a few dozen people had gathered for a vigil. It was the five-year anniversary of the last prisoner’s departure. A band was setting up; a woman was handing out pieces of watermelon. Stewart, the psychotherapist, told the crowd about the impact of the prison’s mental-health services: “You should see the way they could grow. You know why? There was someone there to listen to them. To listen, not correct their grammar, not to give them a diagnosis, not to give them a pill, not to tell them what to do. Tell me your story. I care. We can care. Society can care.” She noted that many of the women could access help at Holloway that was unavailable in the wider world. “What a weird setup, that the only way you can solve your housing problem, your domestic-abuse problem, your drug problem, your being-sexually-abused-as-a-child problem is to come here,” she said.

One of the last women to speak was Mandy Ogunmokun, who had served time at Holloway and now runs a charity called Treasures Foundation, which provides housing and support for women struggling with addiction issues or involved in the criminal-justice system. Ogunmokun was born into a family with a history of prostitution, and she later became a drug addict. (She’s now sober.) “It’s really sad, because I experienced my freedom in there,” she said, gesturing toward Holloway. “I used to end up coming to prison for a break. Because it was in prison that I felt safe, it was in prison that people listened, and it was in prison that I felt the care.” She went on, “That sounds really institutionalized, but then I’d come out of the prison and there was nothing. It was like putting a two-year-old baby outside the gates and saying, ‘Live!’ ” She doesn’t like prisons, but she didn’t agree with the way that Holloway had been closed. “If you close something and then there’s nothing,” she said, “it’s not really thinking about the women.”

Afew weeks after the vigil, I returned to Holloway for a tour of the site, organized by Peabody. Our group included Patricia Ribeiro, one of the development’s architects, who had been assigned to work on the women’s building. Ciron Edwards, a consultant for Peabody, led us through the main entrance, a tall red-brick passageway. He pointed out the reception area and a dark room that had once been the prison archive. The shelves were empty, and shredded cables covered the floor. People had broken into the prison while it sat empty and stripped the cables of copper wire, Edwards explained. Elsewhere, there were signs of other kinds of intruders: fox droppings, and vines creeping in through the windows.

We visited the mother-and-baby unit, the chapel, and the swimming pool. Art work by former prisoners dotted the walls: a paper snowman, a mural of mountains and a sea, a painted family tree. In the cells, paint peeled from the walls in papery rolls, and the metal bed frames, bolted to the floor, had turned rusty. I asked if Peabody planned to reuse any of the materials. “We are looking at what we can salvage out of this,” Edwards said. Perhaps the timber could be reused as balustrades or benches. But, as Edwards explained, they didn’t want the new residents to feel like they were living “in the shadow of the prison.” “It’s a delicate balance,” he said.

What should we, as a society, do with places with difficult histories? Should we paint over them, build around them, bulldoze them? Do we owe anything to the people who once cared about them, who lived and died in them? Sarah Wigglesworth, an Islington-based architect, told me that she thinks the question isn’t about personal preference. “It’s about the fact that, historically, this is what we have done to people,” she said. “We need to remember that when we think about how this site gathers the memory of the past around it.” There is precedent for incorporating historical memory into new developments. In 2017, Wigglesworth’s team proposed a radical redesign of Pentonville, the Victorian men’s prison still in operation not far from Holloway. In the plans, the site retained the prison’s iconic star-shaped layout, but many of the buildings were altered. The chapel became a public market hall. A garden had raised flower beds in the dimensions of a prison cell. “It really turned the whole thing on its head,” she said.

“I keep coming back to this idea of ‘What do you value?’ ” Andrew Wilson, a local resident and former magistrate, and a member of Reclaim Holloway, told me. He posed a hypothetical: What would happen if Normandy Beach were bought, “and the developers said, ‘Right, we’re going to call this Ocean View Estate, and there’s going to be no historical references?’ ” He continued, “The way I was brought up, wars are big deals and you honor them.” Whereas, at Holloway, “women’s history, a hundred and sixty years of incarceration and struggle for women’s rights, is being erased,” Wilson said. “We don’t want this history to be erased.” But that raises the question of whose history should be told? When I spoke with Roz Currie, a former curator at the Islington Museum, who had organized an exhibition on Holloway in 2018, she was wrestling with that question. Should we be telling the story of only the activists once held there, “because everyone’s cool with the suffragettes?” Currie asked. Shouldn’t we also include the stories of those imprisoned for less glamorous crimes, who later rehabilitated their lives? What about the women who didn’t? “Who should we really be representing on the site?” Currie asked.

In March, Currie watched Peabody give a presentation on Zoom about plans for the development. “I feel like they hadn’t got to the detail of everything,” she told me. She asked how they would mark where parts of the prison had been. When Peabody suggested plaques, she asked, “Are you going to put, ‘This is where Ruth Ellis was executed’?” (Ellis, sent to Holloway for killing her abusive lover, in 1955, was the last woman to be executed in Britain.) Currie asked how much of the prison’s dark history would be incorporated into the women’s building, where some have called for a museum. “This is the problem with Holloway. It’s so complicated; it’s got all of these layers. Representing it in a non-carceral space—how do you do that? That’s a really hard question.”

Soon afterward, Peabody hired Currie as a consultant. When I spoke to her last month, she was preparing to hold focus groups—with the prison’s former inmates and workers, with activists, and with local residents—to research “how the story should be told.” “Hopefully we’ll get some answers,” she told me. Recently, Gibbs, from Reclaim Holloway, attended a focus group with other members of the community. “It was full on,” she said. She was feeling more hopeful. Someone had suggested setting plaques into stones to commemorate the women who’d died at Holloway, by execution or otherwise. Perhaps the garden could be planted in the footprint of the old buildings. Perhaps the prison’s wavy wall could be turned into a skate park. “We’ve got loads of ideas,” Gibbs said.

 

Why does the south still loathe the Yankee?

On Sunday 9/20/2021 Jack Tapper of CNN spoke with Governor Tate of Mississippi. It became obvious they were talking past each other.https://youtu.be/sCyeazDiTOY

Here is the core message of Governor Tate Reeves. His Audience are the great 6X generation of the defeated south. Mr. Reeves has to understand what Mississippi is about and he dose: Read it and be honest with yourself: "Mississippi has been bullied by the Yankee regime in Washington for 150 years. That genocidal thug U.S. Grant killed thousands of Christians with guns and fire, seized Oxford in the war of Northern Aggression. The Yankees took labor away and lied to the Black race about freedom. We have suffered violent criminals ever since. Yankee banks charge us higher interest rates, foreigners come and corrupt our culture and sneer at our God. The Yankee liberals have murdered 30 million unborn. The Yankees told the sodomites they are human and their northern supreme court legalized degeneracy and perversion. Joe Biden was VP to the worst president ever. Obama inflicted his communist heath care and radical liberal environmental regulations. We have millions of drug addicts, terrorists and rapists coming over the border. Nancy Pelosi stole the 2020 election to put a feeble-minded Hippie Liberal in our White House. The Yankee regime hates us and abuses all our Christian South every day. CNN is a tool of the radical socialist left. Remember, Gov. Reeves is not talking to you, but the frightened white people of Mississippi.

These are not my personal opinions. David A Fairbanks

 

 

The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine

The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine

Israeli agents had wanted to kill Iran’s top nuclear scientist for years. Then they came up with a way to do it with no operatives present.

By Ronen Bergman and Farnaz Fassihi

Iran’s top nuclear scientist woke up an hour before dawn, as he did most days, to study Islamic philosophy before his day began.

That afternoon, he and his wife would leave their vacation home on the Caspian Sea and drive to their country house in Absard, a bucolic town east of Tehran, where they planned to spend the weekend.

Iran’s intelligence service had warned him of a possible assassination plot, but the scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, had brushed it off.

Convinced that Mr. Fakhrizadeh was leading Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb, Israel had wanted to kill him for at least 14 years. But there had been so many threats and plots that he no longer paid them much attention.

Despite his prominent position in Iran’s military establishment, Mr. Fakhrizadeh wanted to live a normal life. He craved small domestic pleasures: reading Persian poetry, taking his family to the seashore, going for drives in the countryside.

And, disregarding the advice of his security team, he often drove his own car to Absard instead of having bodyguards drive him in an armored vehicle. It was a serious breach of security protocol, but he insisted.

So shortly after noon on Friday, Nov. 27, he slipped behind the wheel of his black Nissan Teana sedan, his wife in the passenger seat beside him, and hit the road.

Since 2004, when the Israeli government ordered its foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, the agency had been carrying out a campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear fuel enrichment facilities. It was also methodically picking off the experts thought to be leading Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Since 2007, its agents had assassinated five Iranian nuclear scientists and wounded another. Most of the scientists worked directly for Mr. Fakhrizadeh (pronounced fah-KREE-zah-deh) on what Israeli intelligence officials said was a covert program to build a nuclear warhead, including overcoming the substantial technical challenges of making one small enough to fit atop one of Iran’s long-range missiles.

Israeli agents had also killed the Iranian general in charge of missile development and 16 members of his team.

But the man Israel said led the bomb program was elusive.

In 2009, a hit team was waiting for Mr. Fakhrizadeh at the site of a planned assassination in Tehran, but the operation was called off at the last moment. The plot had been compromised, the Mossad suspected, and Iran had laid an ambush.

This time they were going to try something new.

Iranian agents working for the Mossad had parked a blue Nissan Zamyad pickup truck on the side of the road connecting Absard to the main highway. The spot was on a slight elevation with a view of approaching vehicles. Hidden beneath tarpaulins and decoy construction material in the truck bed was a 7.62-mm sniper machine gun.

Around 1 p.m., the hit team received a signal that Mr. Fakhrizadeh, his wife and a team of armed guards in escort cars were about to leave for Absard, where many of Iran’s elite have second homes and vacation villas.

The assassin, a skilled sniper, took up his position, calibrated the gun sights, cocked the weapon and lightly touched the trigger.

He was nowhere near Absard, however. He was peering into a computer screen at an undisclosed location more than 1,000 miles away. The entire hit squad had already left Iran.

Reports of a Killing

The news reports from Iran that afternoon were confusing, contradictory and mostly wrong.

A team of assassins had waited alongside the road for Mr. Fakhrizadeh to drive by, one report said. Residents heard a big explosion followed by intense machine gun fire, said another. A truck exploded ahead of Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s car, then five or six gunmen jumped out of a nearby car and opened fire. A social media channel affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps reported an intense gun battle between Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s bodyguards and as many as a dozen attackers. Several people were killed, witnesses said.

One of the most far-fetched accounts emerged a few days later.

Several Iranian news organizations reported that the assassin was a killer robot, and that the entire operation was conducted by remote control. These reports directly contradicted the supposedly eyewitness accounts of a gun battle between teams of assassins and bodyguards and reports that some of the assassins had been arrested or killed.

Iranians mocked the story as a transparent effort to minimize the embarrassment of the elite security force that failed to protect one of the country’s most closely guarded figures.

“Why don’t you just say Tesla built the Nissan, it drove by itself, parked by itself, fired the shots and blew up by itself?” one hard-line social media account said.

Thomas Withington, an electronic warfare analyst, told the BBC that the killer robot theory should be taken with “a healthy pinch of salt,” and that Iran’s description appeared to be little more than a collection of “cool buzzwords.”

Except this time there really was a killer robot.

The straight-out-of-science-fiction story of what really happened that afternoon and the events leading up to it, published here for the first time, is based on interviews with American, Israeli and Iranian officials, including two intelligence officials familiar with the details of the planning and execution of the operation, and statements Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s family made to the Iranian news media.

The operation’s success was the result of many factors: serious security failures by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, extensive planning and surveillance by the Mossad, and an insouciance bordering on fatalism on the part of Mr. Fakhrizadeh.

But it was also the debut test of a high-tech, computerized sharpshooter kitted out with artificial intelligence and multiple-camera eyes, operated via satellite and capable of firing 600 rounds a minute.

The souped-up, remote-controlled machine gun now joins the combat drone in the arsenal of high-tech weapons for remote targeted killing. But unlike a drone, the robotic machine gun draws no attention in the sky, where a drone could be shot down, and can be situated anywhere, qualities likely to reshape the worlds of security and espionage.

‘Remember That Name’

Preparations for the assassination began after a series of meetings toward the end of 2019 and in early 2020 between Israeli officials, led by the Mossad director, Yossi Cohen, and high-ranking American officials, including President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel.

Israel had paused the sabotage and assassination campaign in 2012, when the United States began negotiations with Iran leading to the 2015 nuclear agreement. Now that Mr. Trump had abrogated that agreement, the Israelis wanted to resume the campaign to try to thwart Iran’s nuclear progress and force it to accept strict constraints on its nuclear program.

In late February, Mr. Cohen presented the Americans with a list of potential operations, including the killing of Mr. Fakhrizadeh. Mr. Fakhrizadeh had been at the top of Israel’s hit list since 2007, and the Mossad had never taken its eyes off him.

In 2018, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, held a news conference to show off documents the Mossad had stolen from Iran’s nuclear archives. Arguing that they proved that Iran still had an active nuclear weapons program, he mentioned Mr. Fakhrizadeh by name several times.

“Remember that name,” he said. “Fakhrizadeh.”

The American officials briefed about the assassination plan in Washington supported it, according to an official who was present at the meeting.

Both countries were encouraged by Iran’s relatively tepid response to the American assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian military commander killed in a U.S. drone strike with the help of Israeli intelligence in January 2020. If they could kill Iran’s top military leader with little blowback, it signaled that Iran was either unable or reluctant to respond more forcefully.

The surveillance of Mr. Fakhrizadeh moved into high gear.

As the intelligence poured in, the difficulty of the challenge came into focus: Iran had also taken lessons from the Suleimani killing, namely that their top officials could be targeted. Aware that Mr. Fakhrizadeh led Israel’s most-wanted list, Iranian officials had locked down his security.

His security details belonged to the elite Ansar unit of the Revolutionary Guards, heavily armed and well trained, who communicated via encrypted channels. They accompanied Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s movements in convoys of four to seven vehicles, changing the routes and timing to foil possible attacks. And the car he drove himself was rotated among four or five at his disposal.

Israel had used a variety of methods in the earlier assassinations. The first nuclear scientist on the list was poisoned in 2007. The second, in 2010, was killed by a remotely detonated bomb attached to a motorcycle, but the planning had been excruciatingly complex, and an Iranian suspect was caught. He confessed and was executed.

After that debacle, the Mossad switched to simpler, in-person killings. In each of the next four assassinations, from 2010 to 2012, hit men on motorcycles sidled up beside the target’s car in Tehran traffic and either shot him through the window or attached a sticky-bomb to the car door, then sped off.

But Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s armed convoy, on the lookout for such attacks, made the motorcycle method impossible.

The planners considered detonating a bomb along Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s route, forcing the convoy to a halt so it could be attacked by snipers. That plan was shelved because of the likelihood of a gangland-style gun battle with many casualties.

The idea of a pre-positioned, remote-controlled machine gun was proposed, but there were a host of logistical complications and myriad ways it could go wrong. Remote-controlled machine guns existed and several armies had them, but their bulk and weight made them difficult to transport and conceal, and they had only been used with operators nearby.

Time was running out.

By the summer, it looked as if Mr. Trump, who saw eye to eye on Iran with Mr. Netanyahu, could lose the American election. His likely successor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., had promised to reverse Mr. Trump’s policies and return to the 2015 nuclear agreement that Israel had vigorously opposed.

If Israel was going to kill a top Iranian official, an act that had the potential to start a war, it needed the assent and protection of the United States. That meant acting before Mr. Biden could take office. In Mr. Netanyahu’s best-case scenario, the assassination would derail any chance of resurrecting the nuclear agreement even if Mr. Biden won.

The Scientist

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh grew up in a conservative family in the holy city of Qom, the theological heart of Shia Islam. He was 18 when the Islamic revolution toppled Iran’s monarchy, a historical reckoning that fired his imagination.

He set out to achieve two dreams: to become a nuclear scientist and to take part in the military wing of the new government. As a symbol of his devotion to the revolution, he wore a silver ring with a large, oval red agate, the same type worn by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and by General Suleimani.

He joined the Revolutionary Guards and climbed the ranks to general. He earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Isfahan University of Technology with a dissertation on “identifying neutrons,” according to Ali Akbar Salehi, the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency and a longtime friend and colleague.

He led the missile development program for the Guards and pioneered the country’s nuclear program. As research director for the Defense Ministry, he played a key role in developing homegrown drones and, according to two Iranian officials, traveled to North Korea to join forces on missile development. At the time of his death, he was deputy defense minister.

“In the field of nuclear and nanotechnology and biochemical war, Mr. Fakhrizadeh was a character on par with Qassim Suleimani but in a totally covert way,” Gheish Ghoreishi, who has advised Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Arab affairs, said in an interview.

When Iran needed sensitive equipment or technology that was prohibited under international sanctions, Mr. Fakhrizadeh found ways to obtain them.

“He had created an underground network from Latin America to North Korea and Eastern Europe to find the parts that we needed,” Mr. Ghoreishi said.

Mr. Ghoreishi and a former senior Iranian official said that Mr. Fakhrizadeh was known as a workaholic. He had a serious demeanor, demanded perfection from his staff and had no sense of humor, they said. He seldom took time off. And he eschewed media attention.

Most of his professional life was top secret, better known to the Mossad than to most Iranians.

His career may have been a mystery even to his children. His sons said in a television interview that they had tried to piece together what their father did based on his sporadic comments. They said they had guessed that he was involved in the production of medical drugs.

When international nuclear inspectors came to call, they were told that he was unavailable, his laboratories and testing grounds off limits. Concerned about Iran’s stonewalling, the United Nations Security Council froze Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s assets as part of a package of sanctions on Iran in 2006.

Although he was considered the father of Iran’s nuclear program, he never attended the talks leading to the 2015 agreement.

The black hole that was Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s career was a major reason that even when the agreement was completed, questions remained about whether Iran still had a nuclear weapons program and how far along it was.

Iran has steadfastly insisted that its nuclear program was for purely peaceful purposes and that it had no interest in developing a bomb. Ayatollah Khamenei had even issued an edict declaring that such a weapon would violate Islamic law.

But investigators with the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded in 2011 that Iran had “carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device.” They also said that while Iran had dismantled its focused effort to build a bomb in 2003, significant work on the project had continued.

According to the Mossad, the bomb-building program had simply been deconstructed and its component parts scattered among different programs and agencies, all under Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s direction.

In 2008, when President George W. Bush was visiting Jerusalem, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert played him a recording of a conversation Israeli officials said took place a short time before between a man they identified as Mr. Fakhrizadeh and a colleague. According to three people who say they heard the recording, Mr. Fakhrizadeh spoke explicitly about his ongoing effort to develop a nuclear warhead.

A spokesman for Mr. Bush did not reply to a request for comment. The New York Times could not independently confirm the existence of the recording or its contents.

Programming a Hit

A killer robot profoundly changes the calculus for the Mossad.

The organization has a longstanding rule that if there is no rescue, there is no operation, meaning a foolproof plan to get the operatives out safely is essential. Having no agents in the field tips the equation in favor of the operation.

But a massive, untested, computerized machine gun presents a string of other problems.

The first is how to get the weapon in place.

Israel chose a special model of a Belgian-made FN MAG machine gun attached to an advanced robotic apparatus, according to an intelligence official familiar with the plot. The official said the system was not unlike the off-the-rack Sentinel 20 manufactured by the Spanish defense contractor Escribano.

But the machine gun, the robot, its components and accessories together weigh about a ton. So the equipment was broken down into its smallest possible parts and smuggled into the country piece by piece, in various ways, routes and times, then secretly reassembled in Iran.

The robot was built to fit in the bed of a Zamyad pickup, a common model in Iran. Cameras pointing in multiple directions were mounted on the truck to give the command room a full picture not just of the target and his security detail, but of the surrounding environment. Finally, the truck was packed with explosives so it could be blown to bits after the kill, destroying all evidence.

There were further complications in firing the weapon. A machine gun mounted on a truck, even a parked one, will shake after each shot’s recoil, changing the trajectory of subsequent bullets.

Also, even though the computer communicated with the control room via satellite, sending data at the speed of light, there would be a slight delay: What the operator saw on the screen was already a moment old, and adjusting the aim to compensate would take another moment, all while Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s car was in motion.

The time it took for the camera images to reach the sniper and for the sniper’s response to reach the machine gun, not including his reaction time, was estimated to be 1.6 seconds, enough of a lag for the best-aimed shot to go astray.

The A.I. was programmed to compensate for the delay, the shake and the car’s speed.

Another challenge was to determine in real time that it was Mr. Fakhrizadeh driving the car and not one of his children, his wife or a bodyguard.

Israel lacks the surveillance capabilities in Iran that it has in other places, like Gaza, where it uses drones to identify a target before a strike. A drone large enough to make the trip to Iran could be easily shot down by Iran’s Russian-made antiaircraft missiles. And a drone circling the quiet Absard countryside could expose the whole operation.

The solution was to station a fake disabled car, resting on a jack with a wheel missing, at a junction on the main road where vehicles heading for Absard had to make a U-turn, some three quarters of a mile from the kill zone. That vehicle contained another camera.

At dawn Friday, the operation was put into motion. Israeli officials gave the Americans a final heads up.

The blue Zamyad pickup was parked on the shoulder of Imam Khomeini Boulevard. Investigators later found that security cameras on the road had been disabled.

The Drive

As the convoy left the city of Rostamkala on the Caspian coast, the first car carried a security detail. It was followed by the unarmored black Nissan driven by Mr. Fakhrizadeh, with his wife, Sadigheh Ghasemi, at his side. Two more security cars followed Continue reading the main story

The security team had warned Mr. Fakhrizadeh that day of a threat against him and asked him not to travel, according to his son Hamed Fakhrizadeh and Iranian officials.

But Mr. Fakhrizadeh said he had a university class to teach in Tehran the next day, his sons said, and he could not do it remotely.

Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Supreme National Council, later told the Iranian media that intelligence agencies even had knowledge of the possible location of an assassination attempt, though they were uncertain of the date.

The Times could not verify whether they had such specific information or whether the claim was an effort at damage control after an embarrassing intelligence failure.

Iran had already been shaken by a series of high-profile attacks in recent months that in addition to killing leaders and damaging nuclear facilities made it clear that Israel had an effective network of collaborators inside Iran.

The recriminations and paranoia among politicians and intelligence officials only intensified after the assassination. Rival intelligence agencies — under the Ministry of Intelligence and the Revolutionary Guards — blamed each other.

A former senior Iranian intelligence official said that he heard that Israel had even infiltrated Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s security detail, which had knowledge of last-minute changes to his movement, the route and the time.

But Mr. Shamkhani said there had been so many threats over the years that Mr. Fakhrizadeh did not take them seriously.

He refused to ride in an armored car and insisted on driving one of his cars himself. When he drove with his wife, he would ask the bodyguards to drive a separate car behind him instead of riding with them, according to three people familiar with his habits.

Mr. Fakhrizadeh may have also found the idea of martyrdom attractive.

“Let them kill,” he said in a recording Mehr News, a conservative outlet, published in November. “Kill as much as they want, but we won’t be grounded. They’ve killed scientists, so we have hope to become a martyr even though we don’t go to Syria and we don’t go to Iraq.”

Even if Mr. Fakhrizadeh accepted his fate, it was not clear why the Revolutionary Guards assigned to protect him went along with such blatant security lapses. Acquaintances said only that he was stubborn and insistent.

If Mr. Fakhrizadeh had been sitting in the rear, it would have been much harder to identify him and to avoid killing anyone else. If the car had been armored and the windows bulletproofed, the hit squad would have had to use special ammunition or a powerful bomb to destroy it, making the plan far more complicated.

The Strike

Shortly before 3:30 p.m., the motorcade arrived at the U-turn on Firuzkouh Road. Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s car came to a near halt, and he was positively identified by the operators, who could also see his wife sitting beside him.

The convoy turned right on Imam Khomeini Boulevard, and the lead car then zipped ahead to the house to inspect it before Mr. Fakhrizadeh arrived. Its departure left Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s car fully exposed.

The convoy slowed down for a speed bump just before the parked Zamyad. A stray dog began crossing the road.

The machine gun fired a burst of bullets, hitting the front of the car below the windshield. It is not clear if these shots hit Mr. Fakhrizadeh but the car swerved and came to a stop.

The shooter adjusted the sights and fired another burst, hitting the windshield at least three times and Mr. Fakhrizadeh at least once in the shoulder. He stepped out of the car and crouched behind the open front door.

According to Iran’s Fars News, three more bullets tore into his spine. He collapsed on the road.

The first bodyguard arrived from a chase car: Hamed Asghari, a national judo champion, holding a rifle. He looked around for the assailant, seemingly confused.

Ms. Ghasemi ran out to her husband. “They want to kill me and you must leave,” he told her, according to his sons.

She sat on the ground and held his head on her lap, she told Iranian state television.

The blue Zamyad exploded.

That was the only part of the operation that did not go as planned.

The explosion was intended to rip the robot to shreds so the Iranians could not piece together what had happened. Instead, most of the equipment was hurled into the air and then fell to the ground, damaged beyond repair but largely intact.

The Revolutionary Guards’ assessment — that the attack was carried out by a remote-controlled machine gun “equipped with an intelligent satellite system” using artificial intelligence — was correct.

The entire operation took less than a minute. Fifteen bullets were fired.

Iranian investigators noted that not one of them hit Ms. Ghasemi, seated inches away, accuracy that they attributed to the use of facial recognition software.

Hamed Fakhrizadeh was at the family home in Absard when he received a distress call from his mother. He arrived within minutes to what he described as a scene of “full-on war.” Smoke and fog clouded his vision, and he could smell blood.

“It was not a simple terrorist attack for someone to come and fire a bullet and run,” he said later on state television. “His assassination was far more complicated than what you know and think. He was unknown to the Iranian public, but he was very well known to those who are the enemy of Iran’s development.”

Thomas Meaney on the war in Afghanistan

Like Ordering Pizza

Thomas Meaney on the war in Afghanistan

London Review of Books

Your cause is right and God is on your side!

Zbigniew Brzezinski, US national security adviser, to the Afghan mujahedin,

3 February 1980

I have benefited so greatly from the jihad in Afghanistan that it would have been impossible for me to gain such a benefit from any other chance, and this cannot be measured by tens of years but rather more than that.

Osama bin Laden, March 1997

Once, the Kabul Zoo housed ninety varieties of animals and got a thousand visitors a day, but in the era of fighting that followed the fall of the Soviets and then of Najibullah, the people stayed away, and the animals found themselves in a place more dangerous than any forest or jungle. For ten days, the elephant ran in circles, screaming, until shrapnel toppled her and she died. As the shelling went back and forth, the tigers and llamas, the ostriches, the elephant, were carried away to paradise. The aviary was ruptured and the birds flew free into the heavens from which the rockets rained.

Denis Johnson, 1 April 1997

Let’s step back a moment. Let’s just pause, just for a minute. And think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.

US Representative Barbara Lee, 14 September 2001

This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient. I’m going to be patient.

President George W. Bush, 17 September 2001

The Taliban regime already belongs to history.

Jürgen Habermas, December 2001

I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Donald Rumsfeld, 8 September 2003

I will venture a prediction. The Taliban/al-Qaida riffraff, as we know them, will never come back to power.

Christopher Hitchens, November 2004

The markets for defence and related advanced technology systems for 2005 and beyond will continue to be affected by the global war on terrorism, through the continued need for military missions and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and the related fiscal consequences of war.

Lockheed Martin Annual Report, 1 March 2005

Well, it was a just war in the beginning.

Michael Walzer, 3 December 2009

rambo in afghanistan. A screening of Rambo III at the Duck and Cover. Wear a headband for $1 off drinks.

Email chain invitation, US compound, Kabul, 2010

Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanising the ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German and other European women could help to overcome pervasive scepticism among women in Western Europe towards the ISAF mission.

CIA Analysis Report, 11 March 2010

The overthrow of the Taliban was the ennobling corollary of a security policy; it was collateral humanitarianism.

Leon Wieseltier, 24 October 2010

Now I prefer cloudy days when the drones don’t fly. When the sky brightens and becomes blue, the drones return and so does the fear. Children don’t play so often now, and have stopped going to school. Education isn’t possible as long as the drones circle overhead.

Zubair Rehman, 13-year-old Pakistani student, 29 October 2013

I think his legacy in terms of his country will be a strong one.

US Ambassador James B. Cunningham on Hamid Karzai, 23 September 2014

While America’s combat mission in Afghanistan may be over, our commitment to Afghanistan and its people endures.

President Barack Obama, 15 October 2015

When [Afghans] leave, they break the social contract. This is an existential choice. Countries do not survive with their best attempting to flee. So I have no sympathy.

President Ashraf Ghani, 31 March 2016

He reads books on the transition from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe, on the Central Asian enlightenment of a thousand years ago, on modern warfare, on the history of Afghanistan’s rivers.

George Packer on Ashraf Ghani, 4 July 2016

It was impossible to create good metrics. We tried using troop numbers trained, violence levels, control of territory and none of it painted an accurate picture.

Senior NSC official, 16 September 2016

We’re getting along very, very well with the Taliban.

President Donald Trump, 10 September 2020

This is manifestly not Saigon.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, 15 August 2021

Laura and I, along with the team at the Bush Centre, stand ready as Americans to lend our support and assistance in this time of need. Let us all resolve to be united in saving lives and praying for the people of Afghanistan.

George W. Bush, 16 August 2021

The disarray of the past weeks needs to be replaced by something resembling coherence, and with a plan that is credible and realistic.

Tony Blair, 21 August 2021

Before Afghanistan,? the US air force had no armed drones in its arsenal. Since 2001, ever increasing numbers of ever more sophisticated devices have been used to map enemy positions and conduct strikes – against al-Qaida and IS militants, against Taliban fighters and, inadvertently or not, against Afghan and Pakistani civilians. Two decades of war have left around a quarter of a million people dead and the country largely returned to Taliban rule. In parts of the Western media that have barely bothered with Afghanistan for years there are calls to enter the fray once more, to re-eliminate IS and fight the Taliban (an enemy of IS) back to at least a draw, since, after all, the status quo was ‘sustainable’ and coalition forces hadn’t lost a soldier in more than a year, until August, when they tried to exit. (The casualties had been low because the Taliban agreed last year not to kill US forces in return for Trump’s promise of withdrawal; Afghan military casualties, by contrast, remained steady.) Westerners who now wish to distance themselves from the attacks and desperate scenes at Kabul airport have mentally displaced the two decades of mayhem that led up to this.

Unlike the Soviet departure from Afghanistan in 1988-89, no major power is elated by the American departure. In China, Schadenfreude on Weibo has given way to regret that the US will soon no longer be mired in a hopeless conflict. Fashionable commentary about possible links between the Taliban and the Uighur Muslims appears to be baseless: Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the new leader of the Taliban, has all but offered to send the heads of China’s enemies to Beijing in a box, and dangled the prospect of copper mining and mineral extraction before its patron-in-waiting. In Tehran, Moscow, New Delhi and even Islamabad, governments are more worried about the further implosion of Afghanistan: as far as they’re concerned, it’s 1996 all over again. For Pakistan, the Taliban have long been an asset, promising ‘strategic depth’ against India, but they have also been a risk, as the violence of their homegrown offshoot threatens enrichment schemes dear to Pakistani elites, such as China’s Belt and Road project to connect Xinjiang province to Pakistan’s Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea. Only Erdo?an’s Turkey, which can now amply grant at least one wish of its electorate – that Afghans be kept out – and which can increase its fee for keeping Europe Afghan-free, has more to gain than to lose.

American occupation has made the Taliban more disciplined fighters – with new elite battalions such as the Red Unit – and above all a more media-savvy organisation. Video footage from Kabul airport may dominate online, but a different set of images moved events. These were small videos, captured on phones earlier this summer in borderland provinces, showing Taliban forces taking over Afghan border posts, the soldiers calmly handing over their weapons without a fight. In the larger towns and provincial capitals where the Afghan army did not simply abandon its posts, the resistance evaporated after initial skirmishes and crossfire. The Sher Khan Bandar crossing fell on 22 June; Taloqan and Kunduz (for the second time) fell on 6 August; Puli Khumri fell on 10 August; Ghazni and Herat fell on 11 August; Kandahar on 12 August; Lashkargah on 13 August; Mazar-i-Sharif on 14 August and Jalalabad on 15 August. As the Afghanistan analyst Adam Weinstein put it, the Taliban effectively ‘weaponised the prisoner’s dilemma’. Few regular army units wanted to be singled out for vengeance as lone resisters. The notion that Afghan troops, completely reliant on US air support, could forestall the Taliban was the cover the Biden administration hid behind to manage the exit. (After all, how could the generals object? Hadn’t they praised the capabilities of the Afghan army for years?) The real war in Afghanistan was waged far above ground. In the early days of the conflict, an Allied patrol would need to draw fire before calling in air support, but by the end, as the rules of engagement relaxed, it was only necessary to have a sense of where a Taliban position was to radio in a drone or a fighter jet. ‘It got pretty ritualistic,’ a former US Marine pilot told me last week, ‘like ordering pizza.’

European chancelleries have responded with horror to the apparent contraction of American resolve (the German tabloid Bild Zeitung ran a panicked headline claiming that the Taliban now has more weapons than a Nato state). But the reality may be more bleak. Although Biden played populist tribune for a day (a role he has been itching to perform for decades), dismissing the elite consensus about the war and ignoring the appetite of the military-industrial complex, his decision hardly signals the end of the forever wars. In 2009, when he dissented from Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan, it was less in the cause of devolving America’s global projection of force than of refining it. Biden wanted over-the-horizon capability then, and he wants something like it now. The killing of thirteen US Marines at Kabul airport has not diverted that desire: a reduced US troop presence will provide fewer targets for local militants, Biden has argued, and those militants will be ‘hunted’ for retribution by more remote means. Biden was even more sanguine than Obama about the promise of drones and special forces to fight America’s enemies. He isn’t so much the undertaker of the war on terror as its McKinsey consultant.

The Taliban nearly eradicated heroin production in Afghanistan in the 1990s, but the Allies did everything in their power to push poppy cultivation into Taliban-held territory, and then, by destroying supply elsewhere, to raise prices. They have made the Taliban appear a better prospect to many Afghans than a government that was a byword for crookedness. The departing president, Ashraf Ghani, who in the 2019 election won the vote of 2.5 per cent of the population, who wrote his dissertation at Columbia on state failure, and who fled Kabul in a chopper (according to some sources, with piles of cash onboard), has now joined the ranks of Washington’s failed proxies: Ngô ?ình Diêm, Ahmed Chalabi, Nouri al-Maliki, Hamid Karzai. The corruption of the Afghan government is dwarfed only by that of the American operation itself, which constituted a massive wealth transfer to US defence industries.

Will the Taliban behave? They have entered a very different Kabul – one with beauty salons and shopping malls – from the one they left twenty years ago. In the interim, they have developed the ambition to run a state, which will require a basis of legitimacy outside their own constituency in the country, and international support of some kind. In the first days after they took Kabul, the Taliban made a show of paying respects to Shia Afghans on the holy day of Ashura, taking questions from female journalists at press conferences, relaying their offer of an amnesty to the opposition despite having apparently executed some Afghan soldiers earlier in August, and setting up checkpoints to counter spoiler attacks, which were not long in coming (IS and its local affiliate IS-K are major liabilities for the core of the Taliban leadership that wants to take the reins of what passes for the state). Meanwhile, several of the old players have resumed their original positions. Ahmad Massoud, son of the Lion of the Panjshir Valley, wants to reboot the Northern Alliance, while his press attaché, Bernard-Henri Lévy, has compared the fall of Kabul to the fall of Rome to the Ostrogoths. The ruthless Afghan Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum flew back from hospital in Istanbul to call for war on the Taliban. Navy Seals brandished copies of Clausewitz on Fox News, and Rory Stewart and George Packer wondered if America can still regain its soul. Afghan contractors and co-operators have been consigned the fate of the Hmong of Vietnam and the Harkis of Algeria. And, just as before, the women and girls of Afghanistan are foremost among the war lobby’s playing chips. They face violence from every quarter and their weaponisation by the West – as a post-hoc justification for invasion and now as an argument for continued occupation – only exposes how irrelevant the long-term future of Afghan women has been to the US project. The improvements in their health and education under the US occupation – as under the Soviet one – are incontrovertible. But to cheer on such progress in a Potemkin state is to lead people to the slaughter. There is talk of an effort on a par with that performed after the collapse of Saigon in 1975 to shelter refugees in coalition countries. But an exodus has been going on for years, and today taking in refugees isn’t the symbol of Western largesse that it was in the 1970s. ‘A simple way to take measure of a country,’ Tony Blair once said, ‘is to look at how many want in ... and how many want out.’ That verdict came some time ago in Afghanistan.

27 August