It’s tempting to look at these mob scenes at the Kabul airport and assume the Afghans who are trying to leave are representative of the country as a whole, with the Taliban being cultural intruders. Tempting, but wrong.
The majority of Afghans live in the country, not Kabul. Everything I have read over the years tells me these people wanted, above all, reasonably clean government and an end to the bloodshed. Furthermore, their cultural values are not far from the Taliban’s. They will gladly live with some repression if it also means peace and stability.
In other words, Afghanistan as a whole is more Oklahoma than New York. The refugees-to-be are just a relatively small cohort of liberals that we created during the occupation. They don’t stand for the country as a whole; it would be a mistake for us to behave as if they do. Or, to put it another way, we were the alien force, not the Taliban.