Well, I think that yes there is probably agreement that the central government is corrupt and useless and that it should be replaced with something "better", but now the Taliban have to prove they are that, and of course they won't. So they will end up in the same position as the central government is now, unable to run a country and not speaking for everyone in the country, becoming reviled by various groups and factions, and then civil war.
I think that it will be quite possible it will turn out something like this.
Twenty years ago the fall of the Taliban was very quick after the west started attacking them and the Northern Alliance started their offensive.
Now, twenty years later Afghan people seem to have forgotten how it was under the Taliban, but they do seem to know that what they had in the last years certainly was not how they wanted to be governed.
And thus the Taliban is more or less welcomed back. Maybe not welcomed as such, but seeing them as a better alternative than what was untill recently, the government in kabul.
I think the biggest mistake the west made was going too far too fast in changing their society. Yes we do, tend to, have more democratic and personal freedom, than what do did have over there. But was that really what they aspired to, or wanted as a people (of course there are individual exceptions)?
At heart, Afghanistan, and a lot of other countries there, are very, very religious and conservative.
Maybe helping Afghanistan into a country whose government looked like they had in Iran during the Khomeiny years would have been better? I tend to think this would have been more acceptable to the Afghani people and thus hopefully more longer lasting, than what they had during the last 20 years.
Yes, this is far, far away from western values, but Iran under Khomeiny was much more 'free' than Aghanistan was, and most likely will be, under the Taliban. If that was acceptable to the Afghan people, maybe in due time they would have slowly opened up. Like even Iran is doing right now.
But taking that option would have been absolutely impossible to do by a western power. So we'll never know.
At the moment, the Taliban are in even firmer control of the country than they were twenty years ago, as I don't see a strong Northern Alliance type of counter at this moment.
