Afghanistan news – live: Taliban ‘cannot be stopped by UK,’ as British ambassador to be airlifted from Kabul

Good morning, and welcome to The Independent’s rolling coverage of the situation in Afghanistan. Stay tuned for the latest updates.

Ben Wallace has said it is “arrogant” to think the UK can unilaterally prevent Afghanistan from falling back into the grip of the Talib

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Wallace rejected claims that the UK’s departure from Kabul represented “a failure of leadership and a betrayal of Afghanistan”.

He said that when the US announced its plan he had tried, without success, to find other allies who would take their place and without them, the UK could not “go it alone”.

“A unilateral force would very quickly be viewed as an occupying force and, no matter how powerful the country that sends it, history shows us what happens to them in Afghanistan,” he said.

“It would be arrogant to think we could solve Afghanistan unilaterally. The solution can only come if the force is multinational and the nations involved bring to bear all the tools of nation building - hard power, soft power, foreign aid, and political alliances.

“And from the outset we need to be realistic that you have to manage these types of problems for decades, not fix them overnight.”

He said the position had been made more difficult by a deal which “wrongly suggested to the Taliban that they had won”.

Sir Laurie Bristow, the British ambassador to Afghanistan, is to be flown home by Monday evening, according to reports first published in The Sunday Telegraph.

The Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) had intended for Sir Laurie and a small team of officials to remain at the airport with other international diplomats.

But the newspaper reports that their departure was brought forward amid fears the airport could be overrun as the Taliban continue their lightning advance through the country.

With signs time is rapidly running out, a RAF Hercules was reported to have flown out of the airport on Saturday carrying diplomats and civilians.

The growing chaos - with the signs the government of President Ashraf Ghani is close to collapse - was met with anger and frustration among MPs and British military veterans who served in the country.

US president Joe Biden has authorised the deployment of around 5,000 US troops to Afghanistan to ensure an “orderly and safe drawdown”.

The White House made the announcement on Saturday soon after it was announced that insurgents had captured Mazar-e-Sharif, the Afghan government’s last northern stronghold as city after city has toppled, writes Louise Boyle from New York.

Mr Biden said that he had ordered US military and intelligence forces “to ensure that we will maintain the capability and the vigilance to address future terrorist threats from Afghanistan”.

Former Afghan president Hamid Karzai has tweeted that he met Abdullah Abdullah, head of the Afghan reconciliation committee, on Sunday to decide who should be sent to negotiate with the Taliban.

Officials say the Taliban now hold all of Afghanistan’s border crossings, leaving Kabul airport as the only route out of the country, according to Associated Press.

Pakistan’s interior minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed announced on Sunday that the insurgents had taken the Torkham border crossing. He told local broadcaster Geo TV that Pakistan halted cross-border traffic there because of it. Torkham represented the last post still under government control, he added.

Insurgents have taken the last major city outside of Afghanistan’s capital held by the country’s central government, cutting off the capital to the east. The collapse of Jalalabad, near a major border crossing with Pakistan, leaves Afghanistan’s central government in control of just Kabul and six other provincial capitals out of the country’s 34.

In a nationwide offensive that has taken just over a week, the Taliban has defeated, co-opted or sent Afghan security forces fleeing from wide swathes of the country.

As a result, rapid shuttle-run flights were seen operating near the US embassy. Wisps of smoke could be seen near the embassy’s roof, two American military officials told Associated Press. The Czech Republic also approved a plan to begin withdrawing their Afghan staff from their embassy after earlier taking their diplomats to Kabul International Airport, the news agency reports.

NBC’s Richard Engel and The New York Times’ Sharif Hassan report the following:

Taliban militants have seized the provincial capital of Khost, the largest city in Afghanistan’s southeast.

At just 93 miles from capital city Kabul, Khost’s seizure shows the insurgents are showing no sign of slowing down.

The latest gain was revealed by Afghan officials and the Taliban itself.

Rory Stewart, the UK’s former international development secretary, has criticised Joe Biden’s handling of Afghanistan – again.

He described Afghanistan as a place the US presidents has “just broken through reckless and precipitate withdrawal”.

On Friday, Mr Stewart described the Taliban advance as “our fault” and told CNN that the county’s collapse was a “shameful” humanitarian catastrophe.