It is a debacle on the scale of Vietnam. There is information now that US military has been hiding, through classification, of the hopeless state of the Afghan military, a combination of corruption and lack of patriotism to a degree, and soldiers not wanting to die for corrupt leaders.
We have the same thing here with Kabul that happened in Iraq, phantom soldiers and police where the higher officers would collect the salaries and distribute them to their extended families and bribes for more political influence. As for the collapse, the soldier garrisons were surrendering due to running out of food. The central government, with the US gone, could not even maintain logistics supplies, much less fight.
But for balance, I suspect that attempting to run supplies out to the far away positions would entail a gauntlet of Taliban ambushes, that everyone preferred someone else to do, so no one did it. A people this pitiful has no right to run a country or its military. Their main talent was looting it.
This weekend should have a lot of reporting on what happened. I already have that the US military has classified the hopelessness of the Afghan military for years now. We don’t know if Congress was lied to, the information withheld, or if Congress preferred not to know. At the end of the day, the big contractors kept making their big money and donating to political campaigns. It is a vicious circle.
People and governments in the region might read the U.S. move in leaving Afghanistan as an unreliable partner, but so what? The question as two sides; was Afghanistan a reliable partner. I say no, corrupt to the bone, drunk on the war profiteering and the drug trade, and would prefer the US remain there to spend $1 trillion and then $2 trillion.
Trump completely neutered the Afghanistan government by excluding it from the negotiations. I am certainly not an Afghan expert but saw that as brain dead. Trump was just looking to play Mr. PeaceMaker, the greatest in history to pump up his reelection resume. When they released the 5000 Taliban prisoners with nothing really for it in return, that was the next huge mistake. I suspect the US, with its financial leverage on Kabul forced them to do it and they got nothing really from the Taliban.
China has always been careful not to get sucked into wars. I see nothing that it needs. Maybe the same with Russia. They look at the mess the US got into and would think why take their place. We have to remember that the Afghans may be ungovernable democratically, to where a religious autocracy is their only option that is not a guaranteed new civil war that someone would have to pay for. And with Covid trying to kill everybody, only an idiot would be looking for a shooting conflict now.
NATO weighed in that future recognition would depend on their conduct, a strange comment as NATO has no say in that since it is a UN diplomacy area. I don’t suspect the Taliban has many computer programmers or people who can fix things, so they will enslave those who can to run the country mechanically while they enjoy being the new bosses. One strategy for the west would be to sit back and watch the country become dysfunctional, so the Taliban wants to negotiate or for all we know the Saudis or the UAE or someone else has already promised them funding in exchange for concessions.
The most important issue now is that the infrastructure of the country is not destroyed in a civil war, bad especially for Pakistan, etc. And lastly, major powers will maneuver as how to exploit the situation in a way where if it goes bad someone else can be blamed. Watch how quickly Trump will say Biden ‘lost Afghanistan’; which has always been lost, in my book. All the top government people that can be grabbed will be forced to turn over their Swiss or Dubai bank accounts, those that don’t get on the US airlift.
Afghanistan has been a slow motion train wreck for some time. So maybe better to let it hit bottom and rebuild. But the history is that ‘new thieves’ just take over, and hence the US public will want no part of it when we are running huge deficits here, and a civil war with the Trumpers already planning to steal the next election.