plausible theories emerge on why this clearly orchestrated event went down like it did....my summary below:
With congress tricked into signing up for $5.5-7T worth of "investments" and the executive order to mandate US car manufacturers flip only to EV's there will be a massive shortage of lithium and cobalt needed for these technologies and Afghanistan has them. We haven't been able to settle the heavy Islamist eastern region where the Ghanis are said to have $1T worth of these mineral deposits and we knew the Taliban would never contract mining out to American interests so we cut a deal with the Taliban.
We will now allow China, who share a border with Afghanistan and already formally recognized the Taliban as the true leaders of the country, to do all the work and cement their place as the #1 exporter of rare minerals while at the same time opening them up to build an oil pipeline from Iran to China through northern Afghanistan. China will not only drive the mining and kick back some money to the Taliban but they will jointly run a genocide program on the Uighurs who populate eastern Afghanistan...yes the same Uighurs that China treat as slaves to knit Nike tank tops. Both the Taliban and China despise these people who have been a pain in Afghanistan's (and the US') ass in trying to mine the mineral-rich eastern Ghani region.
so this now begins to unravel as a slick geopolitical maneuver that favors all parties even if it makes America look weak and incompetent
1) US can get their hands on the desperately needed Lithium reserves to back their green technologies program
2) China get rich by exporting these minerals to USA
3) Taliban get rich by selling mining contracts to China and contracts to both China and Iran to lease their land for an oil pipeline
4) Pesky little Uighurs, hated by all parties involved, get wiped out of the region
5) Iran get richer with a more direct oil path into China and added security against the western devil
6) With few shots fired all of the above is achieved without the Civil War that was clearly going to take place in Afghanistan if this plan wasn't already carefully constructed
this leaves one important question...where do the American military contractors go to continue bringing in money? Taliban doesn't need to buy any weapons, they now have the 26th greatest military arsenal on earth. One thing is for sure which is Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Lockheed, Northrop, Ratheon, and General Dynamics aren't just going to allow their annual revenues to drop drastically as their companies are worth several times what they were before 2001 so that means we must create a new "enemy" that the US Govt can start building a new war machine against. That's the last domino to this plan and the only one i haven't seen an answer for. To think that these contractors, who walk the halls of the Pentagon with invoices in hand, will sit idly by and watch their stock prices plummet is impossible.