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The Afghan embassy in Canberra has quietly closed its doors, lowering the country’s tricolour flag and dimming one of the last remaining lights of a fallen democracy.

The decision, by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, reportedly followed a request from the Taliban and has left members of Australia’s Afghan community on edge.

I was a cadet journalist working in Afghanistan in 2012 when the news broke of Julian Assange taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. I was amazed that diplomatic rules barred the British police from entering the embassy and arresting him.

At the time, I was covering the bloody Afghan conflict. The US had just deployed the “mother of all bombs” and the Taliban ruthlessly fought back using child suicide bombers.

There seemed to be no end in sight to the bloodshed and misery. The Taliban would boast the Americans might have watches but “we have the time”. They would drag things on, with no regard for the amount of death and destruction caused.

Then came the day when a deal was signed in Doha, Qatar, between the Trump administration and the Taliban, and the nascent Afghan democracy fell apart. With it went all the rights and freedoms that Afghan citizens, especially women and girls, had become acquainted with thanks to efforts by the US and allies including Australia, who had built schools and nurtured democratic institutions in the war-ravaged country.

Before the Taliban stormed Kabul, most western countries shut their embassies there and flew staff out. For the hundreds of thousands of Afghan soldiers, rights activists and other officials who feared Taliban persecution, the country’s diplomatic missions in nearby Iran, Pakistan and other countries became safe havens.

When I embarked on my own journey out of the country, I saw women shedding tears outside the Afghan embassy in Islamabad as they looked at the tricolour flag still flying high. Unlike inside Afghanistan where the Taliban had replaced the flag with their own, and were enforcing their gender-apartheid policy, outside the country embassy staff kept the old flag and were still treating women as human beings. And they didn’t just offer momentary emotional support – consular services stayed busy beyond official working hours to issue and sort crucial documents to help citizens with their private, financial, educational and other needs.

In the first couple of years of Taliban rule in Kabul, Afghan embassies in most capitals around the globe remained hubs of resistance. They tried to keep the tricolour flag flying high and, with the support of host countries, act as de facto representatives of the fallen democracy.

The closure of the Canberra embassy is another blow for people on the brink of losing identity and hope. For the bustling diaspora, who include members of the Afghan female cricket and football teams living in exile, this represents a further erosion of trust.

On Australia’s part there seems to be reluctance to fight the Taliban on a diplomatic front, instead choosing to ignore the country altogether. But for those Australian soldiers, diplomats and aid workers who lived through the war, together with the Afghans who made huge sacrifices for the promise of a fair and free future, the embassy’s closure is heartbreaking.

Among Canberra’s political power brokers, the Afghan war and the fall of Kabul may now be a distant memory. But it is still possible to salvage a better future for the next generation by not abandoning modern diplomacy when it is needed the most.

• Shadi Khan Saif is an editor, producer and journalist who has worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Germany and Australia