The headline on the National Catholic Register story is simple and timely: “Trapped by the Taliban, Praying for Escape from Afghanistan.”

The reporting is simple, as well, as long as the journalists involved have established contacts with people inside Kabul who have smartphones and there are functioning cell towers and satellites. The story is built on people describing what they claim is going on around them, especially events affecting their families and friends.

These people are U.S. citizens, Afghans with U.S. “green cards” and others who cooperated with Western governments and agencies, including religious groups, during the 20 years of “nation building” in the war-torn land of Afghanistan.

The question is whether the contents of this story remain newsworthy, since Afghanistan has, for now, moved off the front burner in elite newsrooms. What happened? Clearly, Republicans and centrist Democrats had “pounced” on the topic while blasting President Joe Biden and his White House team.

But is this NCR piece news? Yes, it is. Also, this is a story journalists can study while looking for clues about realities, and news, at ground level in the Taliban’s new-old Afghanistan. Here is the overture:

For two decades, Sher Shah had worked alongside U.S. and Afghans to build a democratic country free from the Taliban and war. He had established a new life with his family in the U.S. with the help of Catholic Charities and a Catholic sponsor family, but briefly returned to Afghanistan this summer to attend his father’s funeral.

Now, he’s a man trying to escape the Taliban and get back home to the U.S.

More? Here is a claim — let me stress this is a CLAIM — coming from this source. But the Register report has other anonymous voices making similar statements in what appear to be telephone interviews or contacts via email.

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has stated approximately 100 U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents remain in Afghanistan. …

But Sher Shah said he has heard nothing from the State Department since Aug. 26 — and he made use of the State Department’s information posted on its website for U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents stuck in Afghanistan.

“There are thousands of Americans still in Afghanistan,” he said. “And I’m one of them.”

The reality that emerges, in this stories and others, is that the United States and other Western forces were not engaged in 20 years of “nation building,” as in building an Afghanistan government that looked to the nation’s past — its monarchy, for example. It would be more accurate to say the goal was building a new culture, one that incorporated elements of modernity and even postmodernity in America and Europe.