In the Panjshir Valley of Afghanistan, where resistance to the return of the Taliban took its last stand this summer, odds were never favorable. Food was scarce, as was ammunition. These days, resistance is trying to regroup and find its footing, from neighboring Tajikistan, though pockets of defiance continue in the two dozen tributaries to the main valley. This may not amount to much, or it may be a harbinger of things to come in the rest of Afghanistan.

The same liminality blankets the country. Reporting from inside Afghanistan is often contradictory, but on the streets of major cities, there is talk of a budding sense of security after years of war — at least for some people. There are also expulsions in places like Daikundi province, where the Taliban two weeks ago evicted more than four hundred families. The relative calm in the cities may be momentary, as the Taliban continue to cement their power, within their own factions and among the Afghan people — in both cases, with intimidation, with force, and by curtailing people’s basic freedoms.

There is one rare window on what is happening, as it happens, in Afghanistan: the nightly live feeds of Mohammad Hossein Jafarian, an Iranian journalist who has been covering Afghanistan’s conflicts over nearly four decades. Though virtually invisible to the Anglophone world, his work is among the most influential reporting happening at this moment: Ever since the Taliban takeover, Jafarian has managed almost singlehandedly to create a cri de coeur against the official “neutral” line of the Islamic Republic of Iran which, because of its substantial border and shared language and culture with the Tajiks and the Shiite Hazara, has much at stake in — and political influence over — what comes next.

Jafarian’s nightly interviews bring call-ins from every corner of Afghanistan. Wherever the calls come from, they follow the same themes: kidnappings, executions, extortion, displacement, desecration of monuments, and casual viciousness against women. While the Taliban refute these claims, there is no refuting that the Haqqani network, which historically has had deep ties to both Al-Qaeda and ISIS, is fully in charge of security in Kabul, and it appears that the more extremist elements among the Taliban may gradually be getting the upper hand in a power struggle that in recent weeks has blown into the open.

What made all of this possible, of course, is the US withdrawal from the country, after two decades of so-called nation-building. The US agreed to leave after cementing an understanding with Taliban leadership that they would not allow the country to become, once again, a safe haven for terrorist networks. With its political interests thus recalibrated, US leadership set out to realign the narrative accordingly.

In our first conversation, Jafarian demolished the notion that America stayed in Afghanistan in order to nation-build. In this second installment, he deconstructs another generally accepted fiction: that the Afghan armed forces hadn’t had the will to stay in the fight.

Salar Abdoh: When I heard the US president and the media machine start in on their narrative about Afghans not having a will to fight, I thought to myself: This is like saying the ancient Spartans did not know how to hold a line or use a spear. At the same time, the Afghan army did seem to dissolve overnight. Town after town fell into Taliban hands without so much as a shot being fired. Soldiers and officers in just about every province simply shed their uniforms and walked away. How did this happen?

Mohammad Hossein Jafarian: There is a multiplicity of reasons why the Afghans did not fight. First and foremost is the age-old ethnic issue. In Ashraf Ghani’s government, a non-Pashtun usually had next to no chance at rising in the ranks, and so the average non-Pashtun soldier — of whom there were many — asked himself: Why should I fight? And for whom? Take the case of General Dostum, a shrewd old warrior of Uzbek ethnicity who has been around forever. During Ghani’s first term, they kept him on for a while, as wallpaper to pretend at all-inclusive government. But in reality they almost right away began a campaign of accusations against him and forced him out of office. There was even a directive that was leaked during Ghani’s tenure from inside the office of the presidency; the gist of the directive was that Uzbeks and Tajiks and Hazaras and other ethnic groups were getting too educated. They must be stopped from advancement. Now imagine yourself as a Hazara soldier, an Uzbek soldier: Aren’t you going to ask yourself why you are endangering your life to protect a government that doesn’t even want you around?

Another issue was simple corruption. Take a typical case from the Helmand province, where the commander in charge was getting pay and equipment for five hundred soldiers — weapons, clothes, medical gear, ammunition, what have you. But in reality this commander only had a hundred soldiers under his charge. The remaining four hundred of just about everything that came his way was sold. To whom? The Taliban. Even the extra fuel was sold to them. In others words, there was an entire army of invisible soldiers, men who simply did not exist. And the Americans knew this. It is impossible that they didn’t know.

Now then, you can extend this situation to all other walks of life under the Ghani regime: invisible teachers, invisible municipal workers, invisible men and women in the health sector and so on. People who worked at the customs office did not even need to receive a paycheck; it was taken for granted that whoever works at customs will simply collect their commission through the things they steal. So I ask again: Imagine you are a soldier, getting roughly the equivalent of $100 a month for arguably the most dangerous job on the planet. And you are witness to all these things happening around you. What motivation are you going to have to fight? And for whom? Any honest Afghan commander will tell you that the support network the Americans had been giving them basically went offline, almost literally, from one day to the next. All the software, gone. Helicopters might be able to lift off for a few more days, but they no longer had the capacity to hunt the Taliban. The Americans had created a situation where their contractors basically ran the software that their sophisticated weapons need to function correctly. Without the contractors and the American military’s air support, the Afghan soldier was fighting in a blind battlefield.

Now, imagine you are an Afghan soldier in a firefight. American jets and attack helicopters are hovering overhead, as if they are watching a video game, but they do not lift a finger to give you support. As an Afghan fighter, what are you supposed to think? What’s the point of fighting at this juncture? You are low on ammunition, you haven’t eaten a square meal in weeks, if you get wounded there is nowhere you can be given proper medical attention. The 300,000-strong army with its sophisticated equipment was a mirage from the beginning: It never existed, just as nation-building never existed in Afghanistan.

Abdoh: I just read about how a $150 million construction plan for villages in the Bamiyan province turned into a few pieces of poor quality wood imported from Iran. A native of Bamiyan said that the villagers decided to investigate what became of the money and found that most of the money had been skimmed off by various international organizations before it even reached Afghanistan. The wood they finally received wasn’t even any good for building anything. They ended up chopping it up for firewood.

Jafarian: I’m not surprised. This wasn’t an exception, it was the process. That is the entire history of America in Afghanistan. Every day, in every province, something like this was happening.

But to go back to why the Afghans did not fight. There is a third and most important reason: The Afghan army was not only fighting the Taliban; it was also fighting the Americans themselves and the Ghani government. There were five thousand Taliban prisoners whom the Americans insisted must be released.

Let’s go over this again: The Americans, yes the Americans, forced the Afghan government to release five thousand Taliban prisoners, who would then go back to fight the Afghan army. The option of a prisoner exchange was not even on the table. The Americans wanted the release of these five thousand right away. Why? And what is a soldier fighting on the frontlines of Kandahar, Herat, Kabul, or Mazar supposed to think of this? How does he interpret it except to believe, correctly, that this fight is make-believe and that there is absolutely no point in putting his own life at risk? Add to that the fact that the Ghani government was purposefully giving key positions and command to inept or corrupt officers, while in many instances orders were coming straight from Kabul to give up the fight and hand over the cities to the Taliban.

Abdoh: Why would the Kabul government tell the commanders in the field to stop fighting?

Jafarian: Why would the Americans insist on the release of that many Taliban prisoners? Because this was not war; it was a pretense of war. The joke in Afghanistan was that the Ghani regime was “a government of three” — Ghani himself; Hamdullah Mohib, who was his national security advisor; and Fazal Mahmood Fazli, who was his chief of staff. There are reports of calls coming from Kabul, often from the security advisor, ordering a field commander to stand down. Abdul Sattar Hosseini, a parliamentary representative from Farah province, has said that the army was not only beating the Taliban in that province, but was in fact getting ready for a counterattack when the order came directly from Mohib to stand down and give Farah over to the Taliban. The same sort of thing happened in Ghazni. In Badakhshan, army units were ordered to leave even before the Taliban came calling. Taliban would finally show up and ask the inhabitants which Taliban units in the area had defeated the army. No one knew, least of all the Taliban. It was absurd. I can sit here and go through a list of town after town, city after city where this sort of thing happened.

Two years before Kabul falls, the Americans were already in Doha, Qatar negotiating with the Taliban and making them promise not to give visas to those terrorists who are sworn enemies of the United States. Listen, you don’t go around telling someone to issue or not issue visas if you don’t already think of them as the de facto government of a country. Between the Americans and the Ghani government, it was as if the two were in a race to see who could smooth the way faster for the Taliban to stroll into Kabul.

Abdoh: This is hard to swallow. After nearly a trillion dollars, and all the Americans dead, and all the years spent there in Afghanistan, we are to believe the Americans really only created a military force that was set up to fail?

Jafarian: It was not set up to win. That’s for certain. A child would know that without all that software and contractor know-how and necessary spare parts, the so called 300,000-strong army would be nothing more than a sitting duck, or like a toaster oven or some other gadget that hasn’t a socket to plug into. All the Blackhawk helicopters in the world are meaningless if you can’t take them off the ground.

Abdoh: So what happens to all this equipment, some of it among the most advanced battlefield machinery that exists anywhere in the world?

Jafarian: Well, one scenario might go something like this: Since you, the Taliban, don’t know how to plug back in the toaster oven we left behind for you, it’s in your best interest to do what we say. If that happens, it is not impossible that our contractors might return. But, of course, someone (not us) will have to pay them. And handsomely.