The fall of Kabul on Sunday 15 August was the culmination of an unexpected offensive by the Taliban, in which they had seized most districts and all major cities — along with Afghanistan’s main border crossings. The rapid progression was in part due to coordinated peace agreements which were struck with local leaders, while Afghan troops exchanged U.S. vehicles and weapons for safe passage.
The swift collapse came as a shock to most observers. Just two days earlier, the Pentagon had claimed Kabul was “not right now in an imminent threat environment”. Two weeks earlier, the Pentagon’s assessment was that Kabul could fall within six months. When, just a month earlier, a journalist asked Joe Biden whether he saw any parallels with the end of the Vietnam war, his answer was: “None whatsoever. Zero.” The President added that the Taliban were not “remotely comparable in terms of capability” to the North Vietnamese Army.
It seems that even the grimmest predictions got the real balance of power between the Taliban and the Afghan government wrong. What explains the systematic underestimation of the Taliban’s capabilities? Our research on NATO’s withdrawal from combat operations in Afghanistan suggests
— source ineteconomics.org | Thiemo Fetzer, Pedro Souza, Oliver Vanden Eynde, Austin Wright | Aug 18, 2021