I'm a little confused here. Are you saying that because the US knocked over the Afghan government in 1979 that it's good that Afghanistan would hand over control of the country to Islamic extremists 40 years later to make us look like asses?
Had that not happened the problem may well not have existed in the first place, at least not in this form. Who knows where the Taliban would be now had they not received billions upon billions of operation Cyclone money from the CIA as well as MI6 aid? Now it exists and all 20 years of occupation did was turn everything back to square 0, only after hundreds of thousands of casualties.
I don't know how this is supposed to promote progress in Afghanistan as they're now under the Fox News version of Sharia law. You know, the throwing homosexuals off of rooftops sort of Sharia law. Are you really okay with that? Do you seriously think that's a better form of government than the US backed one?
You mean the kind of Sharia law which was already prevalent in most of Afghanistan because the government had no legitimacy or control over most of the country, even under many of the areas they ostensibly held? Who knew that invading and occupying some place and setting up a silly puppet government won't make it magically change. Clearly, for many people in Afghanistan (especially the higher ranking officials as it seems) the Taliban have more legitimacy than the puppet government. Like, again, they didn't get overwhelmed by the Taliban, the army just straight up defected immediately. They just didn't give a shit to protect that government, at all. Doesn't matter if it was "better", it had no legitimacy and almost no one cared to protect it. The Taliban are now supposed to bring back stability, so they can't step on too many toes. Hopefully with stability there may come economic growth, which is what comes before improving social norms, but in an organic and permanent way that's not just a facade to sell a war. All this could have started happening 20 years ago.
There was precedent for this not working in Afghanistan, I don't know why anyone believed it would work this time. The USSR already tried it and failed (only back then the US was on the side of the Taliban or mujahideen as they were called). And it actually had a better chance of working back then since the Saur revolution which they tried to defend came from Afghans, not the USSR, which only later got involved. But it wasn't that simple, the mountain farmers did not like what was going on and the blowback ended up overwhelming them. Yet somehow people still thought "oh, it's surely gonna work this time because the USSR were bad guys and we are good guys so it's different if we do it". Evidently not, if it's gonna get better it's gonna get better because of the efforts of Afghans, and it was always that way, and invasion only sets things back.
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