The Taliban made faster progress than even the most pessimistic predictions. The Afghan National Army is essentially a phantom apparatus where the officer corps (appointed through their connections to government officials via patronage networks) make fraudulent reports on the size of their formations in order to embezzle money that's supposed to be paid to the enlisted troops. What troops actually make it onto the books use the army as little more than a meal ticket, or worse, desert very shortly into their term to sell their weapons and equipment to local warlords or the Taliban itself. The Afghan government itself is disgustingly corrupt and completely fails to provide basic services or any semblance of a justice system (the Afghan police are infamously useless and widely hated) because the leaders are too busy embezzling Western aid money and getting rich off connections to the heroin and opium trades. As a result no one who isn't an outright American comprador has any stake in the Afghan "state" as it exists, the Taliban have much more going for them in terms of grassroots appeal - resistance to foreign occupation, increasingly nationalistic appeals beyond their original ethnic Pashtun base (that they've taken the entire northeast so quickly, the original stronghold of the Northern Alliance that originally served as the most entrenched resistance to the Taliban back in the 90s, is a damning testament as to how broad their appeal has become and how little legitimacy the Kabul government has), and an actually functioning justice system based on Sharia law (yeah, it's brutal and uncompromising, but it follows through on things, unlike what the Afghan government provides).
It was widely expected that the Kabul government would be able to hold out in the urban centers for some time fighting either a stalemate or gradually losing war against the Taliban, a la the communist Najibullah regime that, hilariously, outlived the USSR by a good 2-3 years. But this expectation has completely collapsed in the course of the last couple of day, as every other major city outside Kabul, including Herat and Kandahar, has fallen as of yesterday. The government essentially has weeks to live. How did the Taliban accomplish this? They are essentially going up and making announcements that they will spare any ANA deserters and even throw in concessions like lowering taxes for local business owners if the soldiers lay down arms and go home. If you resist, you will be slaughtered, no prisoners. And the soldiers are just going home, because the Taliban have actually built up a reputation of honoring their word, amazingly enough. At this point the last remaining holdouts are Kabul itself and the central regions inhabited by the Shiite Hazara people, who fucking hate the Pashtun Taliban.
This was always inevitable. That the Kabul regime was ever a functioning "democracy" at all that respected "human rights and rule of law" was always a fantasy constructed by American propaganda, for the domestic audience, in order to justify this forever war. Now the house of cards is coming down, and revealing the apparatus was even more rotten than the cynics assumed.
The Taliban made faster progress than even the most pessimistic predictions. The Afghan National Army is essentially a phantom apparatus where the officer corps (appointed through their connections to government officials via patronage networks) make fraudulent reports on the size of their formations in order to embezzle money that's supposed to be paid to the enlisted troops. What troops actually make it onto the books use the army as little more than a meal ticket, or worse, desert very shortly into their term to sell their weapons and equipment to local warlords or the Taliban itself. The Afghan government itself is disgustingly corrupt and completely fails to provide basic services or any semblance of a justice system (the Afghan police are infamously useless and widely hated) because the leaders are too busy embezzling Western aid money and getting rich off connections to the heroin and opium trades. As a result no one who isn't an outright American comprador has any stake in the Afghan "state" as it exists, the Taliban have much more going for them in terms of grassroots appeal - resistance to foreign occupation, increasingly nationalistic appeals beyond their original ethnic Pashtun base (that they've taken the entire northeast so quickly, the original stronghold of the Northern Alliance that originally served as the most entrenched resistance to the Taliban back in the 90s, is a damning testament as to how broad their appeal has become and how little legitimacy the Kabul government has), and an actually functioning justice system based on Sharia law (yeah, it's brutal and uncompromising, but it follows through on things, unlike what the Afghan government provides).
It was widely expected that the Kabul government would be able to hold out in the urban centers for some time fighting either a stalemate or gradually losing war against the Taliban, a la the communist Najibullah regime that, hilariously, outlived the USSR by a good 2-3 years. But this expectation has completely collapsed in the course of the last couple of day, as every other major city outside Kabul, including Herat and Kandahar, has fallen as of yesterday. The government essentially has weeks to live. How did the Taliban accomplish this? They are essentially going up and making announcements that they will spare any ANA deserters and even throw in concessions like lowering taxes for local business owners if the soldiers lay down arms and go home. If you resist, you will be slaughtered, no prisoners. And the soldiers are just going home, because the Taliban have actually built up a reputation of honoring their word, amazingly enough. At this point the last remaining holdouts are Kabul itself and the central regions inhabited by the Shiite Hazara people, who fucking hate the Pashtun Taliban.
This was always inevitable. That the Kabul regime was ever a functioning "democracy" at all that respected "human rights and rule of law" was always a fantasy constructed by American propaganda, for the domestic audience, in order to justify this forever war. Now the house of cards is coming down, and revealing the apparatus was even more rotten than the cynics assumed.