I think everything that needs to be said about the rapid collapse of the Afghan puppet regime has already been written, but if there is any point that needs to be reinforced, the biggest problem with contemporary elites isn't corruption, or even competence, it's a lack of balls
It isn't simply courage in the face of physical danger which is a related field, but the willingness to step out in front of the social firing line and display leadership by taking an unpopular stance that is inconsistent with opinion survey results, or explain the cost benefit
of any decision made to the public. The Afghan regime such as it was consisted of two components, warlords whose loyalty was secured by US fund transfers but the bigger problem were the US elite collaborators that weren't even particularly unique to Afghanistan. They are in fact
quite a universal class of bourgeois compradors that can be found throughout the third world. Elites more familiar with Western culture than that of their own homelands. Self-indulgent, smarmy, effeminate, dislocated from their own people are all adjectives than accurately sums
them up as a whole. The odd thing is, is that they are so functionally identical to present Western elites. Happy families are all alike while all dysfunctional families are dysfunctional in their own idiosyncratic ways, but it turns out to be not true. Modern politics creates a
class that is uniformly dysfunctional all in the very same ways with shared failings. The only difference was that in Afghanistan you had counter-elites available and a sufficiently "pre-modern" population who were able to deliver a slight push that sent the whole edifice into
collapse. The take away is not that "it can't happen here", which is true in as much as such elites are more entrenched and the population are not hungry enough to effect change, but rather that it is shockingly easy and rapid to knock such a government over with sufficient force
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