They had agreement with the government forces and militias who've withdrawn
Taliban represents a population about twice the size of the other ethnic groups in Afghanistan and those groups are fragmented by tribal loyalties and ethnicities. US threatened to bomb the Taliban before 9/11 if they didn't share power with the other groups.
"Today, it has been largely forgotten that through much of the 1990s, the Clinton and Bush administrations had covertly sponsored the Taliban in Afghanistan, despite it harbouring bin Laden’s network, while the group was negotiating multi-million dollar pipeline contracts with US companies Unocal and Enron. At one of these meetings in the summer of 2001, Bush administration negotiators warned the Taliban that they would face US “bombs” by October if they refused to comply with a US-brokered plan to get them to form a federal government with the Northern Alliance, making the Trans-Afghan pipeline possible. Former French intelligence officer Jean-Charles Brisard speculated that the 9/11 attacks may have been a pre-emptive strike prompted by US threats.
So if Saudi Arabia has been complicit in the expansion of Islamist terrorism, questions need to be asked about the West’s role in this complicity."
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/did-us-and-britain-collude-in-murder-of-jamal-khashoggi/
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In response to this post by turkeytrot)
Posted: 08/15/2021 at 6:34PM