You have the watches, we have the time a Taliban commander infamously warned an American in 2002 Afghanistan. It was ominously accurate. Months earlier, America had swiftly ousted a flailing Taliban government, pledging to rebuild the embattled country. Fifty nations joined the ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ war machine and for two decades, foreign armies poured into Afghanistan along with eye‑watering amounts of foreign aid funding. Yet now the Taliban is back in charge of the entire country. So what went wrong?
