Afghanistan update: It's really bad

Taliban flag flying over the main square in Kunduz yesterday

The New York Times writes:

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban seized three Afghan cities on Sunday, including the commercial hub of Kunduz, officials said, escalating a sweeping offensive that has claimed five provincial capitals in three days and shown how little control the government has over the country without American military power to protect it.

Never before in 20 years of war had the Taliban directly assaulted more than one provincial capital at a time. Now, three fell on Sunday alone — Kunduz, Sar-i-Pul and Taliqan, all in the north — and even more populous cities are under siege, in a devastating setback for the Afghan government.

The fall of these cities is taking place just weeks before U.S. forces are set to complete a total withdrawal from Afghanistan, laying bare a difficult predicament for President Biden.

Since the U.S. withdrawal began, the Taliban have captured more than half of Afghanistan’s 400-odd districts, according to some assessments. And their recent attacks on provincial capitals have violated the 2020 peace deal between the Taliban and the United States. Under that deal, which laid the path for the American withdrawal, the Taliban committed to not attacking provincial centers like Kunduz.

Now the map looks like this:

The government doesn't control much. It is rapidly collapsing, as one would expect of a grossly incompetent, deeply corrupt kleptocratic organization.[1] Also notice how useless the February 2020 agreement that the self-described world's best negotiator and world's smartest person negotiated. That agreement wasn't worth spit the day it was signed by the world's allegedly best negotiator and smartest person. 

A bit of historical and personal context 

If I recall correctly, in ~2003-2004 or thereabouts, the Afghan government kicked US auditors out of the country, accusing them of trampling on the sacred sovereignty of Afghanistan. In fact, the auditors were limiting theft of US tax dollars too much. The kleptocrats were pissed that they could not steal freely. They wanted more. The news article I first read those fun facts in was also the first time I recall seeing the word kleptocracy used to describe a country's government. That stuff really stuck with me. When the US auditors got kicked out was when I first concluded that Afghanistan would probably end up being a tragic disaster like Vietnam. And, there's other significant parallels with Vietnam.[2]

Questions: Was the February 2020 agreement between the US and the Taliban good or bad in terms of what it contained (discussed in this post)? Will the Afghan kleptocracy survive for at least six months as US experts have confidently predicted, or will it fall sooner to the Taliban? Should the US welcome the kleptocrats and their stolen billions of US tax dollars into the US so we can get some return on our investment, or is that a bad idea and the kleptocrats should live in France and spend our money there? Because they keep electing crooks and/or liars to office, do the American people deserve to lose their civil liberties, the Republic, the rule of law and democracy?

Footnotes: 

1. I know, deeply corrupt and kleptocratic are duplicative. Bad grammar. I just did it for emphasis.

2. For example, this from the Washington Post in 2019:

U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found. 

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.  

The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.  

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

That sure does sound familiar. The press fighting in court to release information that shows the US government to be a bunch of lying liars about a hopeless war. 

Of course we don't know how much we spent. The auditors were kicked out years ago.