It took merely a few days for the Taliban to spread over Afghanistan and capture the territory they did not command, sometimes taking over provincial capitals with hardly a shot in rage.

While enough is made of the Afghan army’s military failure, conferences with Taliban leaders, diplomats, Afghan politicians, and other observers recommend the Islamist militant movement set the foundation for its success long before the issues of the last week or so. Planned for a more complex effort to re-take command of a country they controlled from 1996-2001, the agitators stated they developed relationships with low-level political and military leaders and tribal chiefs.

That, and the pre-announced departure of international troops from Afghanistan almost 20 years after America’s most prolonged conflict started, destroyed confidence in the Western-backed control in Kabul and urged people to defect “The Taliban didn’t intend to fight battles,” said Asfandyar Mir, a South Asia security analyst associated with Stanford University. “They rather intended to cause a political collapse.” The rate of the Taliban’s gains amazed even them. Last week, cities and towns dropped like crazy, also; in the north of the country, where the Taliban are comparatively weaker, completing in Sunday’s control of the capital Kabul.

One Taliban head in the central region of Ghazni stated that once government forces could notice the United States was eventually moving, resistance broke. In just 7-8 days, all of Afghanistan’s main cities, from Kunduz to Kandahar, had dropped. “It doesn’t indicate that these Afghan officers surrendering to us had changed or become religious; it’s because there were no more dollars,” he stated, pointing to financial help the government and army had gained from the West for almost two decades.

“They surrendered like goats and sheep.”

Western-backed President Ashraf Ghani left abroad, and most other administration members went hiding and could not reach. Even Ghani’s defence minister criticized his surrender. A July statement from SIGAR, the Congressional watchdog organization selected to watch the US mission in Afghanistan, stated that Afghan forces placed some level of opposition in some areas, “while in rest they surrendered or left in disorder.” As his soldiers took over the presidential palace, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of the leading planners of victory as head of the Taliban’s administrative office in Doha, told it was a remarkable triumph but one that had grown surprisingly speedily. “We have entered a situation that is unexpected,” he said.

‘Not the same situation.’

Suhail Shaheen, a Taliban representative located in Doha, told big numbers of districts were acquired through contacts with a deep tradition in Afghanistan, where causing rivals to change sides has been a usual tactic. “(We had) direct communications with the defense forces there, and also by the mediation of tribal chiefs and religious scholars,” he stated. “All over Afghanistan, not in a specific province or a specific geographic location.” After remaining driven from power in the US-supported campaign of 2001, the Taliban slowly rebuilt, funded by opium and illegal mining and usually avoiding large-scale encounters so long as US airpower was there to help the Afghan army. Instead, they preferred to choose remote centers and checkpoints and grow panic in cities by suicide bombings. In the meantime, they gained control of many provincial regions with a shadow government with its courts and tax regularities. In northern and western areas, where the predominantly ethnic Pashtun Taliban movement has been traditionally more vulnerable, it shore up local help and wins over Tajiks, Uzbeks and others in Afghanistan’s jumble of ethnicities, residents and officials there have told.