So Called Experts react:

The Taliban has taken Kabul. Now what?

The Taliban has completed its lightning advance across Afghanistan by taking control of the country’s capital — all but guaranteeing a long-feared national takeover.

With President Ashraf Ghani reportedly having fled the country and the United States rushing to evacuate its personnel from Kabul as Afghan leaders work to form a transitional government, reality is setting in: After two decades and some $2 trillion spent, Washington’s nation-building effort appears to have failed.

That will likely have far-reaching consequences not only for Afghanistan, but also for American foreign policy and the world at large.

Our experts, many of whom have spent many years in the trenches on Afghanistan policy, are sending their reactions as these historic developments unfold. This post will be continuously updated as more come in and we track this fast-moving story.

‘A debacle in many acts’

The decision to withdraw was defensible, and like many who fought there, I supported it. There was a vast chasm between the Afghanistan that was talked about in policy circles and the flimsiness of the institutions we were building on the ground.

But the execution of that decision was appalling — even more so for an administration that has been praised for its professionalism and expertise. There are many victims of this poor planning: interpreters who will never escape, Afghan soldiers who are attempting to hide, and the women and children who are now left without a future.

By April of this year, however, the United States was also well past any decision points that would have altered the outcome of the war in a strategic way. Over the past two decades, none of the three troop surges — one in each prior administration — had a demonstrable, lasting effect on either the battlefield or the Afghans themselves. They are a wary people: As my former commander, John R. Allen, used to note, they have been in a civil war for the past forty years. They hedge their bets. We did not go into Tora Bora; we neglected Afghanistan for Iraq; and we failed to force Pakistan to sever ties with the Taliban.

We built an Afghanistan in our own image, not theirs.

Our single worst failure came at the beginning, with our attempt to create a strong, multiethnic central government with control over the entire country — something which had never existed before in Afghan history. A more realistic, if pessimistic, strategy would have been to reinforce ethnic militias to create a strong Kabul and north, then rely on local allies and traditional leaders to keep the Taliban out of surrounding provinces. Through a constant practice of give-and-take, in which local power centers are alternately bought off and bullied by the central government, something resembling lasting stability may have been achieved. It would have ben a stability bought at the cost of our more aspirational goals, certainly, but also a stability which would not have melted away in a week.