From Our Own Correspondent

It’s been a week of searing and surreal images from Afghanistan after the Taliban’s lighting takeover of Kabul. The spectacle of an official Taliban news conference, televised live from the capital on Tuesday, was proof of how just how fast events have moved. The Taliban leadership may have promised forgiveness, reconciliation and protection of women’s rights. But the mood is fearful and there are still thousands of Afghans desperate to get out of the country by any means possible. Lyse Doucet has been hearing from many of them. As the West’s twenty-year mission to Afghanistan comes to an end, there are questions around the world about how the international intervention, and the new political structures set up after 2001, went so desperately wrong, so fast. Paul Adams has also been covering events and searching his own memories of time spent with foreign forces in the country for clues.The latest earthquake in Haiti has inflicted more losses on a nation that’s endured plenty of them. The shocks and aftersho