Former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said in May that the country's government could resist the Taliban 'forever' without US assistance

• Ashraf Ghani in a May interview was confident that the government could fend off the Taliban.
• In April, President Joe Biden announced that US troops would withdraw from Afghanistan by September.
• "If I did anything, it was to prepare our forces for this situation," Afghanistan's ex-president said at the time.

Ashraf Ghani, the former president of Afghanistan who fled the country on Sunday as the Taliban captured all the provincial capitals and advanced into the capital city of Kabul, said only months ago that the government could withstand attacks from insurgents "forever" without the US assistance.

President Joe Biden in April announced that he would pull all US troops out of Afghanistan by September.

During a May interview in Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, Ghani was optimistic that the country could stand on its own when the US would eventually retreat from having a substantial presence in the region.

When asked if the country could resist the Taliban's attacks without US support, Ghani had a quick response: "Forever."

"If I did anything, it was to prepare our forces for this situation," he added. "We have already effectively resisted the first wave of attacks in May. But are you writing about that too? We are defensible. The fundamental issue was actually the ambiguity of whether the Americans would stay or leave. That went on for two years. Now there is clarity, now a new chapter is being opened and new rules of the game apply."

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When pressed about whether the country could devolve into a civil war, similar to the failed Soviet War in Afghanistan that went on from late 1979 until 1989, Ghani didn't rule it out, but was intent on focusing on how the country had continued to function.

"The probability of a civil war is there," he told Der Spiegel. "But it doesn't have to come to that. You know, when the combat mission officially ended in 2014 and was modified as a training mission, everybody already saw the demise of the republic coming. But we made it work. Please take into consideration that all of this is also a question of narrative: The more the scenario of destabilization is spread, the more we are confronted with violence here."

Ghani, who previously served as Afghanistan's finance minister, was first elected to the presidency in 2014 and won reelection in 2019.

While the Taliban had made key advances in recent days, the pace of the insurgency over the weekend was stunning.

On Saturday, Mazar-i-Sharif, the fourth-largest city in Afghanistan and the government's last northern stronghold, fell to the Taliban, as insurgents carried out a sweeping military campaign in seizing provincial capitals.

Taliban forces that same day captured Jalalabad, the capital of the eastern Nangarhar province.

As the insurgents approached Kabul, Ghani fled the country by plane and headed for Tajikistan, according to Reuters. The Taliban took control of the presidential palace, almost 20 years after being ousted from power by US-led forces.