Taliban ideology is so deeply ingrained in the dominant Pashtun tribesmen, that Taliban control has been inevitable for centuries.
Wild, considering the Taliban are barely 30 years old.
Pashtuns are Pashtuns and don't like women, gays, or kleptocrat pedophiles. That's just how they are, and they're proud of that too. They are much closer in thinking to a 19th century Britisher than a 21st century Westerner, really.
This is not a deep secret to anyone who bothers
reading a travel guide from the 90s though. The Taliban just exploited (in a non-pergorative sense) these long standing practices and cultural beliefs to create a government that had some semblance of popular support among the politically active classes of Afghanistan: village headmen, tribal elders of local things/jirgas, and rural, adult, fighting age males.
It's not much different to what the US did with its support of the KMT (the uglier and more corrupt of the CPC), the ARVN (ditto), or the ROK (which managed to turn itself around eventually), as the US modus operandi is to support kleptocrats. Or maybe kleptocrats just gravitate to America when it bombs a somewhat stable government it disagrees with.
The United States attempted to import an alien culture that the Pashtuns disagreed with, while employing kleptocrats to do so. It overlooked and brushed aside real complaints from the common folks, failed to recognize (collectively) that it cannot do what it wants to do, and never bothered to change course. Afghans probably would have accepted an American Army of Retribution or Punitive Expedition, Central Command, because it's a rough place and that's what Afghans would do in the same situation. They wouldn't try to force Pashtunwali down the throats of Bay Area tech bros.
The last time the US did a major, classical style punitive expedition was Panama. The second to last time was Iran and Praying Mantis. It's hardly rare. Why Afghanistan was different is complicated (the US State Department had become something of a religious cult in the wake of the Reagan Administration's misunderstandings of Marxist-Leninism and the reasons for the collapse of the USSR, which was sort of like a post-modern, mirror image Domino Theory), but suffice to say you can boil the main issues down like this:
Pashtuns are Islamic, rural, pious farmers.
Americans (and their allies) are Christian, urban, secular bureaucrats.
This is something of an unbridgeable divide unless you're willing to put aside that you can't mould Pashtuns into Americans, which is apparently difficult for the US State Department to do, collectively. The British Raj did this only after the 1842 disaster, in the 1880s when it was able to come to terms with the Emirate through the Treaty of Gandamak.
The United States may still learn from the experience and similarly be able to come to peaceful terms with Pashtuns in the future.
and subsequent fall from great heights.
