At an impromptu press conference organized by the Taliban after taking power, one of the commanders said that the "Americans" kept him in the Guantanamo camp for eight years and tortured him there.
That was hardly the case. But it was clear that the American "war on terror" radicalized many people in Afghanistan - and that many have not forgotten it to this day.
During that time, unpleasant scenes were unfolding at the Kabul airport. There, crowds of people tried to board US Air Force planes that had come to evacuate American citizens. People were clinging to the plane that was taking off and thus dying. American soldiers fired into the mass of gathered Afghans.
"One of my relatives was killed. He was a doctor," Sangar Pajkar, a Dutch-Afghan journalist, told me later. And the Afghan-American writer and activist Nadia Hashemi claims that the soldiers did not let some American Afghans on the plane. The reason: they weren't white Americans.
The latest scenes from Kabul have shown more than ever that the West's involvement in Afghanistan is a failure.
In the speech that followed, US President Joe Biden did not even mention the Afghans who were killed in the US "war on terror". Instead, his words exuded a refusal to face reality. The real winners of the war do not sit in the White House, but in Kabul.
The causes of the West's failure were suppressed and ignored for years - not only to save face, but also because the West did not know Afghanistan even after so many years.
Practically all the districts of the provincial capitals that fell before Kabul had been under Taliban control for years. They came to their senses there and acted - and even ruled - from the shadows. In those rural regions, extremists have strengthened their positions, among other things, due to the great corruption in the capital and the numerous operations of NATO and their Afghan allies.
Because drone attacks and brutal night raids regularly resulted in many civilian casualties in Afghan villages. Many family members of the victims joined the Taliban in one way or another.
It was the same near Kabul. Long before all this, it was enough to leave the capital by car - and after 20 to 30 minutes of driving, you could already reach the territory controlled by the Taliban.
Representatives of Western governments did not want to face such realities.
Instead, they wallowed in self-praise, talking about "our compelling values" and focusing on the supposed achievements that have been introduced in Afghanistan since 2001.
They talked about democracy, although in the last twenty years there has not been a single democratic change of power in Afghanistan.
It was certainly not because of the Afghans who risked their lives and went to vote, but because of the corrupt elite that the US brought to power in Kabul.
People like Hamid Karzai or the fugitive Ashraf Ghani used the new system for their own purposes and constantly resorted to falsifying election results to stay in power.
Other actors behaved similarly, for example, numerous local warlords and drug lords who became the West's most important allies in the Hindu Kush. Thanks to abundant financial aid from abroad, they managed to get rich and transfer billions of dollars to other countries.
They also "earned" money thanks to the private security companies they created to defend NATO units from attacks - which they themselves faked. That's how they signed lucrative contracts with NATO.
Washington knew about all that, and so did others. At the end of 2019, the Washington Post published the so-called "Afghanistan Papers", in which about 400 high-ranking US officials admit in more or less clear terms that the US has completely failed in Afghanistan. Details about it have been kept under wraps for years.
But even today, no one will talk about it. Instead, it is claimed that the Taliban, as if out of nowhere, suddenly overran the country.
After a misguided intervention that lasted two decades, costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and turning millions of people into refugees and pushing them into poverty, the West has not only lost interest in Afghanistan, but also does not feel responsible for the misery.
"That's just the way it is. It's not our fault!" - that's how you can sum up the comments that are echoing everywhere these days.
*Emran Feroz is an Austrian with Afghan roots. For years he has been reporting for German-language media such as Zeit, Tageskeitung, or international media such as the New York Times or CNN.
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