Why the Taliban Won: Sharia Is the Democratic Will of 99% of Afghans. By the Pew Research Center, from a survey in 2013.
73% of Afghans believe that Sharia is the revealed word of God, rather than a body of law developed by men based on the word of God.
99% of Afghans support making sharia the official law of the land:
61% of Afghans believe Sharia law should also apply to non-Muslims, and 78% believe that religious judges should decide family and property disputes.
81% of Afghans support hudud punishments (lashes to banishment to death for theft, adultery, making unproven accusations of adultery, consuming intoxicants, armed robbery and apostasy).
79% of Afghans support the death penalty for leaving Islam.
Wikipedia: 99.7% of Afghans are Muslims.
Okay, 99% of Muslims in Afghanistan want sharia to be the official law of the land, and 99.7% of Afghans are Muslims, so I’d say that in Afghanistan: Sharia = Democracy and Democracy = Sharia.
Further, Afghans don’t want some watered-down namby-pamby modern version of sharia fit for extolling in TED Talks and at Davos. The huge majority of Afghans want the Iron Age straight stuff complete with hand-chopping of thieves and stoning of adulterers …
In other words, the USA leapt first into the Modern Muslim Nation-Building game not in some easy introductory setting like, say, Bosnia or Malaysia, but instead at the final, hardest level: Afghanistan, the human race’s most proudly knuckle-headed country.
No wonder the local branch of the globalist western bureaucracy wasn’t popular in Afghanistan, and like the Communist Government installed by the Soviets, was overthrown at the first opportunity.
However, despite being fiercely Islamic, the Afghans are not exactly enamored of the Taliban. Anatoly Karlin:
According to the most comprehensive poll on the matter, most Afghans did not actually sympathize with the Taliban. The percentage of Afghans who said they sympathized with the Taliban in 2019 was just 13%, shrinking to 8% in Kabul. Even amongst ethnic Pashtuns, this percentage was just 21%. If this poll is accurate, it would imply the Taliban had less popular support than Islamic State in its heartlands of Al Raqqa. (Incidentally, the fact that many Western commenters believe that Taliban support was broad-based is a testament to Taliban PR).
And yet, even so, the Taliban went through the ANA like a hot knife through butter, strolling from town to town in their sandals, firing their rifles from the hip without aiming, like you can see in combat videos from Sub-Saharan Africa.
It seems that normie Afghans are not Islamist enough to want the Taliban, but nor are they motivated enough to stick their necks out for a highly corrupt government that few saw as “theirs” and which confirmed their intuitions by fleeing to Dubai as the Taliban closed in. …
Ironically, the USSR’s creation lasted three years. Despite the mujahedeen receiving much more in the way of foreign support, Najibullah’s government managed to independently mount multi-division offensives against the jihadists after the Soviet withdrawal and survived for a bit more than three years, when Soviet aid dried up. In contrast, it appears that the Americans were simply uninterested in building an actual army that could operate independently without their oversight. … Even the South Vietnamese regime lasted for two years [after American forces withdrew].
