Andrey Avetisyan, a veteran Kabul diplomat, said talk of a handover to the Afghans was currently unrealistic because the coalition had failed to build the nation's forces or economy.
The rampant corruption riddling the administration was the West's fault for ploughing huge sums into badly-coordinated, opaque aid projects he said.
Mr Avetisyan, who began his career in Kabul in the 1980s and speaks Dari and Pashtu, said the West had not learned from Soviet mistakes.
"They are repeating all of them and they are making new ones," he told The Sunday Telegraph.
"For the last eight years, there have been no big projects, not infrastructure projects," he went on.
"A school here, a hospital there. When it is built people start asking 'Well where are the teachers and the doctors?' because no one thought about it before." The Afghan government was crippled by a shortage of able, trained civil servants. The new army was being trained "almost on the battlefield".
Senate Democrats called BS, literally, on Donald Trump’s claim that the war in Iran is over,...
In an extraordinary article published on 7 April, the New York Times described how Donald Trump...
On 28 February 2026, the first day of the war, the US and Israel launched a...
Iran’s foreign minister returned to Pakistan on Sunday for peace talks, despite US President Donald Trump...
