It will be a matter of the magnitudeBut how easily French cinema engages with immediate reality and boasts of any small feat in a national key. The director of the recent adaptation ofThe Three Musketeers brings to the screen the real episode of the emergency evacuation of hundreds of Afghan refugees carried out in extremis by a handful of French embassy police officers during the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. Based on the book by the man in charge of the operation, 13 days, 13 nights It takes the point of view of the police commander, a pragmatic veteran about to retire who must deal with the absolute chaos of a broken country, the extreme desperation of Afghan civilians, the threat of the Taliban and the doubts of the other police officers and their superiors.

There are inexplicable errors that come at an astronomical price. After two decades of fighting the Taliban, rampant corruption, and hundreds of thousands of lives sacrificed, the Western withdrawal from Afghanistan ended in chaos as dramatic as it was spectacular. The images that remained, in the eyes of a history that seemed to repeat itself, evoked the fall of Saigon (Vietnam) in 1975. But the chaos continued long beyond those days of August 2021.

The defeat of the Afghan army and the seizure of power by the Taliban, which has come about with a speed entirely unforeseen by the White House, has many ramifications both inside and outside the new Islamic emirate. For example, the Taliban have appropriated the huge military arsenal that was part of the Afghan armed forces. For the time being, the Pentagon has not made public a precise assessment of how many units of each type of American-made weaponry have fallen into the hands of the fundamentalist movement, but it is feared that light weapons number in the tens of thousands, armoured vehicles in the hundreds and helicopters and warplanes in the tens.

Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani left the country on Sunday accompanied by aides, according to Afghanistan's Tolo News shortly after the Taliban entered the capital, Kabul. Reuters says he is on his way to Tajikistan. The Taliban are trying to confirm whether he has left and have given the go-ahead for the full entry into Kabul "to prevent looting", Reuters reported, as policemen have deserted their jobs. The Taliban's final assault for full control of Afghanistan is already underway in Kabul, with a spokesman for the radicals promising that it will be "a peaceful transition".