Newspaper headlines: 'The West flees' as 'Taliban rule returns' - BBC News
The Taliban seizing Afghanistan's capital, as the country's government collapses, dominates the front pages.
The fall of Kabul to the Taliban dominates the front pages

The fall of Kabul dominates the front pages, with most featuring images of Taliban fighters in the presidential palace and military helicopters airlifting westerners to safety.

The Metro calls it a "humiliating echo" of the evacuation of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war.

The Daily Telegraph says the "desperate scramble" to escape saw "chaotic" scenes at Kabul airport, with the British and US governments left "shocked" by the speed of the Taliban advance, as well as the inability of the Afghan military to repel them.

Analysts have told the Financial Times the morale of the Afghans was "severely damaged" by the abrupt pace of the US troop withdrawal, undermining their will to fight.

According to the Guardian, the Taliban entered Kabul "not as fighters, but as policemen" after looting broke out when the surrender of government forces appeared inevitable.

It says there was "anger" in the capital about President Ashraf Ghani's decision to flee to Uzbekistan, just a day after he appeared on TV promising to reorganise the army.

The Daily Express warns of "dark days" ahead for women, noting that sales of burqas have increased in Kabul, "with prices rising tenfold".

The Daily Mail is scathing in its assessment of the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan by the West.

"What the hell did they all die for?" its headline asks, alongside a photograph of the funeral of one of the 457 British service personnel killed there.

Ministers now stand accused of "presiding over the biggest foreign policy catastrophe in 65 years", it says.

Writing in the Times, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Tom Tugendhat, agrees that the UK is facing its biggest overseas disaster since Suez crisis of 1956 when the UK failed to regain control of the canal in Egypt.

He warns that Britain remains "impotent" in the face of US policy, and says government cuts to defence, diplomacy, aid and trade "will look different today from how they did a week ago".

The Sun thinks the retreat from Kabul is "shameful", arguing the US intelligence services committed a "monumental error" by failing to realise Afghan cities would fall so quickly.

The Daily Mirror accuses Downing Street of being "asleep once again", claiming the way Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab had to "hurry back" to the UK from holiday is "symbolic" of how Britain and the US underestimated the Taliban.

The FT acknowledges it was former US President Donald Trump who announced America would pull out of Afghanistan, but going ahead was his successor Joe Biden's choice. The paper describes the move as a "miscalculation" that will "haunt the rest of his presidency".

That view is shared by the New York Times, which says fairly or unfairly, Mr Biden will go down in history as the president who presided over a humiliating final act in the Afghan experiment.

"After seven months in which his administration seemed to exude much-needed competence", it says, "everything about America's last days in Afghanistan shattered the imagery".

The Wall Street Journal is even more damning, arguing Mr Biden's statement on Saturday washing his hands of Afghanistan "deserves to go down as one of the most shameful in history" by a president at a moment of American retreat.

For the Washington Post, this was a "disaster" produced by four administrations, but there was "nothing inevitable" about the outcome, which will "leave an indelible stain" on the current commander-in-chief.