How can everyone quietly observe the Taliban overthrowing the Afghanistan Government?
How can the US quietly withdraw its troops and diplomats?
How can China declare friendly support to the Taliban?
What are we missing here?
It is the Taliban version 2.0
It took 20 years for version 2.0 to be released
Has the Taliban changed its ideology?
Are they more civilized now?
Not really.
Did the Taliban win the hearts of Afghans?
They don’t have to.
Then what has changed?
Taliban learned the Art of Diplomacy.
It took two decades in the making.
You must listen to Taliban Spokesperson Suhail Shaheen.
He speaks of policy, reforms, and non-violence.
Do we need to believe him or the Taliban for that matter?
Not really.
However, what they have earned the hard way is “The Benefit of Doubt”
Somewhere there is a hope that the Sharia law will work in Afghanistan.
That benefit of the doubt was enough to throw the world into a standstill, a spiral of inaction and indecisiveness.
Afghanistan is no longer as strategic as it was in the 70s and the Taliban is not really perceived as a terrorist organization by outsiders.
It is seen as an organized army of 75000 that has taken city after city without major conflicts.
The world forgets, we have a short memory.
The ability to organize, plan, and ability to communicate that plan to the world is a skill in itself that the Taliban has built over the years.
Back in 2001, they didn’t have it.
All they could think was Hijack a couple of planes and ram them into the twin towers.
It is a wait-and-watch game as to how the Global powers will play this out.
But there is a reason Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires, it has not failed to live by that sobriquet.
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