The Taliban are the closest thing Afghanistan has to a legitimate government. There are other factions there but they're mainly etnic minorities and not as powerful as the Taliban. The government are a bunch of US puppets. The US is spending more than the entire GDP of Afghanistan to pay for the army and security forces that keep them in power. Once they pull out, even if they keep funding all that it'll fall apart about as quickly as the South Vietnam government did.



Going back to the arrogance we showed in turning up there and expecting them to become a liberal democracy. The Taliban and even all the competing groups there are all either entirely made up of or dominated by religious conservatives. Imagine some Muslim superpower invading America and telling American religious conservatives that they'd have to accept Sharia law. How well would that work exactly?