Looking back at Afghanistan as the past returns

Morning sunlight poured into the third-floor office of Abdul Hakim Mujahid as he stared down at the streets of Kabul. The onetime Taliban ambassador to the United Nations found himself in a reflective mood as he pondered Afghanistan’s future.

“It was wrong for the United States government to collapse the Taliban regime while totally ignoring that you needed the Taliban to be involved in forming policy or you would get this,” he said.

When we met in 2012, Mr. Mujahid belonged to Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, and “this” referred to the long-running stalemate between the U.S. military and the Islamist insurgency.

During the past week, as the Taliban seized Kabul and reclaimed the country, his words echoed in my memory, except “this” had gained new meaning: the rapid fall of the Afghan government, the large-scale surrender of its security forces, and a sudden, devastating return to the past. Twenty years erased before the world’s eyes.

My sense of foreboding about such a scenario deepened in the weeks after President

Repeating historyThe war’s deep tollCast into uncertainty