The thing is, Afghanistan being what it is, there was bascially only two ways this situation would play out.
- US/Allies essentially annex the country in part or full.
- US/Allies leave and the Taliban take over again at some point.
As much as we’d like to believe option 3 - set up democratic government and leave, everything is fine - was on the table, it wasn’t and the collapse of the entire government in essentially a week has proven that.
Since option 1 would cause the woke social justice types to scream about how evil it would be (not to mention the pretty much perpetual ongoing insurgency it would create), then leaving was the only other likely outcome and we’ve just seen what happened there.
I’m still trying to work out how 300,000 government troops, with armoured vehicles and at least some aircraft, appear to have not even bothered trying to to fight 50,000 Taliban, who have no tanks, some humvees and technicals, and no actual aircraft (that I’m aware of).
There’s obviously a lot of stuff to do with the political situation there which I’m simply not across, but it’s hard not to look at the utter collapse of the government and apparent complete lack of resistance and think “This appears to be what the Afghani people want”.