From Ann Jones in TomDispatch, this stuff just beggars belief:

A few invaders strolled unopposed to the city center to raise the white flag of the Taliban. Others went door to door, searching for Afghan women who worked for women’s organizations or the government. They looted homes, offices, and schools, stealing cars and smashing computers. They destroyed three radio stations run by women. They attacked the offices of the American-led organization Women for Afghan Women and burned its women’s shelter to the ground. They denied reports on Kabul TV stations that they had raped women in the university dormitory and the women’s prison, then threatened to kill the reporters who broadcast the stories.

[…]

The next day I got an email from a woman newly assigned to the American Embassy in Afghanistan. Security rules keep her confined behind the walls of the embassy grounds, she said.  Still, knowing that Afghan women are not “secure,” she is determined to help them. Her plan, admittedly still in the brainstorming stage, calls for “programs that will teach women how to defend themselves in some form or another,” because “the best way for women to be safe is for them to know how to keep themselves safe.”

And:

For months, the Taliban had been capturing bits and pieces of Kunduz Province, yet their attack [on Kabul] apparently took the city’s defenders by surprise.  Afghan security forces numbering 7,000 scattered or retreated before the advance of a few hundred Taliban fighters.  While its commanders tried to figure out what to do in response, American Major General Todd Semonite wrapped up his stint as head of the American mission training the Afghan National Army by congratulating ANA officers at a ceremony at “Resolute Support” headquarters in Kabul.

“You have made phenomenal progress,” he told them, “in budgetary programming, pay, personnel, and force structure systems... improving accountability while finding savings in the budget.” We know what the major general said because the U.S. military itself proudly released his statement to the press, as if it were something other than one more incandescent example of American obliviousness to the condition of the country U.S. forces have occupied for 14 years.