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I think you're confusing America bombing Afghanistan into the ground with the Soviet Union bombing Afghanistan into the ground. Since the Soviets invaded, and the US propped up the proto-Taliban in response, Afghanistan's government has been fundamentally broken. The US bears a lot of responsibility for that but the invasion of Afghanistan arguably made things better for a brief window.

Who do you think was in charge before the US started bombing them?

Watch your back. You might hurt it contorting that much to make every world problem the US’s fault.

As if this religion (and many others, yes) didn’t always have this problem.

There was a lot wrong in Afghanistan but it wasn't the use of force. The people there absolutely wanted a chance to get out from under the Taliban. Bush fucked it from the beginning though, trying to give them the world's most corrupt western style government, lying about reports of the Taliban resurging, and letting the DEA loose on their cash crops. You could easily see just how badly the country wanted the Taliban back with the massive waves of people fleeing them. We failed them badly, but not in the way you guys think.

The impression I've always gotten (and I'm sure no political guru or social scientist or anything of the sort) isn't so much that the country overall prefers the Taliban as much as most of them just don't really give a rat's ass about the country as a whole or who's claiming to be in charge of it at any given time, they don't have a strong sense of national identity, they care for more about their tribe or village than anything going on outside of it. American, Russian, Taliban, doesn't really matter too much to them, when the guys with better guns roll into town, you pay them lip service until they go away then continue right on doing things more or less the same way you have for the last 2000 years.

It does happen that the Taliban probably aligns with their traditional values more closely than the other people who have tried ruling it as a unified country over the years, but day-to-day, they're still probably mostly only going to the Taliban when they need something from them and deferring to village elders or local warlords or whoever for everything else.

There's variation I'm sure, those in cities probably have a stronger sense of what a country is and what it has to offer in the modern world than those in rural areas, but it's a largely rural country, almost 75% of them are living in rural areas and some of them are super rural where some of them have probably never even seen a city.

I don't think the two are related. I'm pretty sure that the root of the current Islamic rule is from the US funding the mujahideen against the Soviet Union back in the 70s.

Afghanistan isn't really a cohesive country in the first place. There have been a lot of warring factions in the past few hundred years, both foreign and domestic, and none of them have brought all the people under one flag.

It's not that they'd rather have the Taliban, it's that they want to be left alone and they don't care who's in Kabul.

They didn't go back to the taliban because they wanted to.

Iran, Pakistan, Russia and China were supporting the taliban, and gave them what they needed to take the country back. We didn't focus on cleaning up Afghanistan because our moron in chief threw all our resources at Iraq because it had oil, so we lost twice over.

Nobody wanted the taliban back except Pakistan and China, Pakistan because they consider the taliban to be 'useful' allies against India, and China because the taliban made them lucrative resource deals: https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Afghanistan-turmoil/Afghanistan-s-6.5bn-mine-deals-with-China-others-dig-up-questions