The Taliban was able to capture nearly every major provincial capital in Afghanistan, plus the capital city of Kabul, in just one week. How can an organisation which has been in hiding for two decades possess such an incredible tactical brilliance? Or has the Afghan success much less to do with their military capabilities, and much more to do with tragic western incompetence?

It started in December 2001, two months after the US invasion of Afghanistan. The bureaucratic geniuses at the United Nations had helped dream up something called ISAF, or International Security Assistance Force. ISAF’s mission was to train the Afghan military and police forces in order to defend themselves and fight against the Taliban insurgency. (Here is one of those fantastic international "peace-keeping" organisations: https://www.osce.org/ )

But most people on the ground knew it was a total farce. The US Soldiers who were deployed to Afghanistan in support of ISAF used to joke that the acronym stood for “I Suck At Fighting”. The conventional Afghan units couldn’t be relied upon, which is why ISAF ended up doing most of the fighting against the Taliban. Another joke was that, at least for the Afghan army recruits, ISAF stood for “I See Americans Fighting.”

It’s noteworthy that ISAF did not come from soldiers or generals. It came from a multinational committee of bureaucrats who sat around a conference table 10,000 miles from the front lines and planned out something that they knew nothing about. Yet to add credibility to their plan, the bureaucrats brought in a bunch of mujahideen warlords to sign off on the deal. Little did the bureaucrats realize that these were the same warlords who were responsible for Afghanistan’s civil war in the 1990s. The warlords happily obliged, knowing they would be able to milk ISAF for countless millions of dollars and military resources to keep themselves in power and undermine US strategy.

ISAF was a bad idea from the start, practically by design. Bureaucrats wrote the policies. Politicians set the Rules of Engagement. Poll numbers dictated strategy. And any objective assessment showed that it wasn’t working. For example, after nearly a decade of war-- plus hundreds of billions of dollars spent and an incalculable cost of human life and limb-- the security situation in Afghanistan was so bad that President Obama increased the troop count to 100,000 in August 2010, up from 25,000 in early 2008.

ISAF will go down as one of the failed military strategies. There are so many tragedies here. All the money spent, the accumulated debt, the lives and limbs lost, the civilian casualties… and for what purpose? So that the Taliban could take over tens of billions of dollars worth of US military equipment that the Afghan military abandoned? And not only from the US, also from its vassals. So many countries envolved in Aghanistan internal business. https://www.youtube.co/watch?v=NEBsEKsOFlY
And then, all in vain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn70qYPR1aU

There are now thousands of local Afghans who served the US military as interpreters, administrators, etc., each of whom was promised a US immigration visa, especially in the event that the Taliban took over. Yet according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal, there are more than 20,000 Afghans who were promised US visas. But due to the State Department’s bureaucratic rules, it may take 12-18 months to process them. Most of those people fear they’ll be killed by the Taliban before their visa is approved.

This is a pretty powerful symbol to people around the world-- that regardless of what you’ve been promised, America will leave you to be slaughtered.  Then there’s the appalling level of incompetence and miscalculation in failing to anticipate this outcome. It was only five weeks ago when the US president insisted that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

And yet it happened in a week. It’s difficult to blame the President for failing to predict the Taliban’s success; he surrounds himself with ‘experts’ who are supposed to figure these things out. And after all, we have to trust the experts, right?