The national sport of Afghanistan is Buzkashi, an ancient game involving men on horses, attempting to drop the carcass of a dead goat into a chalked circle or goal at the end of a large field. The imagery the popular sport evokes could very well be a metaphor for the horrific state of affairs Afghanistan is today. The lives of the people of Afghanistan are being flung around helplessly as the Taliban have now seized Kabul and have scored their winning goal.
As Taliban forces entered Kabul on 15 August, President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and America abandoned its embassy in panic. This has been the culmination of months of a vicious rampage across the country, accelerating at a dangerous pace towards national domination. After the group signed the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan with the United States in Doha last February, it steadily made military gains, capturing village after village, setting in motion a domino effect of districts falling into their control, either by violence or fearful surrender.
In the years to come, while historians, political and military analysts will delve into the numerous reasons of how the Taliban were able to outlast a superpower and bring the Afghan nation to its knees, the most glaring and obvious cause for the Taliban’s success has been the support it has received from Pakistan.