Vanda Felbab-Brown
In the end, it took astoundingly little time after U.S. forces left Afghanistan for the Taliban to bring down its government: ten days. On Friday and Saturday, hour by hour, some of Afghanistan’s biggest provinces surrendered to the Taliban as the Islamist insurgent group carried out a terrifying blitz. And on Sunday, as the Taliban entered Kabul, the U.S.-backed government fled, leaving the Taliban in charge of the entire country.
Perhaps no one predicted that the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces would fold so quickly. But for several years, there had been signs that the Taliban were becoming militarily ascendant and that the ANDSF suffered from critical deficiencies that the Afghan government ignored and was itself exacerbating. All the problems that allowed the Taliban to defeat the army so quickly in 2021 were on display in 2015, when the group temporarily seized Kunduz, a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan: poor morale, desertion, attrition, corruption, ethnic factionalism, bad logistics, and an overreliance on backup from Afghan special operations forces. And for years, it was no secret that ANDSF units were making deals with their supposed enemy—warning the Taliban of forthcoming offenses, refusing to fight, and selling the
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