[109][61][110] Afghans are also more loyal towards their traditional ethnic, tribal and even familial ties than they are to a central government in Kabul, which the provincial Taliban commanders exploited to negotiate surrender of many troops.

[5] In the south and east, various Pakistani militant groups supported the Taliban offensive including Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (which had about 5,000 fighters in Afghanistan),[3][120] Harkat-ul-Mujahideen,[3] Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

[147] Subsequent US airstrikes against the Taliban were led from the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and the US Navy carrier strike group in the Persian Gulf, requiring the warplanes to travel several hours to reach their targets.

[148][149] On the first weekend of July, hundreds of armed women took to the streets of northern and central Afghanistan in demonstrations against the Taliban offensive, the largest one taking place in Firozkoh, the capital of Ghor Province.

[18] On 14 July, the Afghan border post at Spin Boldak was captured by the Taliban force;[159] Reuters Indian journalist Danish Siddiqui was killed there while covering the fighting two days later.

[161] On 16 July, Uzbekistan hosted a conference between a number of the region's leaders and foreign diplomats, including Afghan President Ghani, to promote peace and prevent a civil war.

[192] Abdul Rashid Dostum, the ex-warlord and the strongman who had traditionally dominated the city, took his followers and fled to Khwaja Du Koh District, the only area in Jowzjan Province which was still government-held.

[197][198] Reporters described the capture of Kunduz as "the most significant gain for the Taliban since they launched their offensive in May" with the city being one of Afghanistan's largest settlements, well connected to other notable locations in the country including Kabul and considered part of a major Central Asian drug smuggling route.

[203] Deputy governor Sefatullah Samangani told the AFP news agency that government forces had withdrawn from the city without a fight after community representatives had requested that it be spared more violence.

The military base was responsible for security of Kunduz, Takhar and Badakhshan and was one of the eight such installations in Afghanistan;[212] its fall further reduced the suffering morale of the Afghan National Army, while effectively making a government counter-offensive to relieve Mazar-i-Sharif impossible.

[21][234] Government loyalists put up a determined defense in Logar before being overrun, while Zabul and Uruzgan were only surrendered to the rebels after the local defenders judged their situation to be untenable and opted to retreat.

[259][260] Boeing CH-47 Chinook and Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters began landing at the American embassy in Kabul to carry out evacuations and diplomats were rapidly shredding classified documents.

[268] Speaking later from the United Arab Emirates, Ghani said he left on the advice of government aides to avoid being lynched (Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah had been publicly hanged upon the previous Taliban takeover in 1996).

[278] The same day, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William J. Burns, held a secret meeting in Kabul with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar, who returned to Afghanistan from exile in Qatar, to discuss the 31 August deadline.

[285] Human rights group have also blamed the Taliban for series of revenge killings targeting people who were close to General Abdul Raziq Achakzai in Kandahar province.

[88] Continuing through to mid 2021, each successive surrender was used to help convince other governmental and village leaders and scale up in size to district level, to allow the Taliban forces to take control of much of Afghanistan without military fights.

[89] According to Afghan special forces officers interviewed by Susannah George, some of the surrenders were motivated by the payments, while others were due to opportunism – the desire to be on the winning side that became credible following the February 2020 US–Taliban deal.

Saad Mohseni, head of TOLOnews, stated that the Taliban's "outreach was fantastic" and that they "capitalised on intratribal, ethnic, religious and ideological differences to win over people" and exploited popular complaints against the government.

[89] The Washington Post contrasted the Taliban's claims to follow "ancient moral codes" with its "strikingly sophisticated social media tactics to build political momentum".

[89] Andrew Watkins, senior analyst for Afghanistan at the International Crisis Group, said there was no evidence that the Taliban had increased their manpower to conduct this offensive, aside from utilising some of the 5,000 insurgents who had been released earlier.

[114] Mike Martin, a former British army officer, said that Ghani lacked the political skills to keep Afghanistan's many different ethnic groups loyal to the idea of a national cause.

Abdul Raziq Achakzai, a former Afghan National Police chief, was accused of running secret detention centers and carrying out or ordering torture and extrajudicial killings by human right organisations.

"[303] Dr. Antonio Giustozzi, a senior research fellow at Royal United Services Institute on terrorism and conflict, wrote, "Both the Russians and the Iranians helped the Taliban advance at a breakneck pace in May–August 2021.

[110][313] A report from the American Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) released on 17 August found that the US had "struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy" for the war and that "if the goal was to rebuild and leave a country that could sustain itself and pose little threat to US national security interests, the overall picture is bleak".

[71] On 25 August, Alexander Mikheev, the head of the Russian state exporter Rosoboronexporter, told Interfax news agency that the Taliban had captured more than 100 Mi-17 Hip helicopters of various types.

[363] Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, former Afghanistan's defense minister and one of the current leader of National Resistance Front, tweeted one of the images circulating online and called Iran a “bad neighbor.”[364] Female MPs have gone into hiding since the offensive.

[369] With the fall of Kabul, former Northern Alliance members and other anti-Taliban forces based in Panjshir, led by Ahmad Massoud and former Vice President Amrullah Saleh, became the primary organized resistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

[408] Pakistan Intelligence Agency's (ISI) chief Faiz Hameed visited Kabul and met with Taliban leadership as well as other Afghan leaders including former prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

[414] On 14 September, the European Parliament passed a resolution deploring the Taliban for taking over Afghanistan via force of arms, failure to uphold promises for an inclusive government, not respecting human rights and freedoms of the Afghan people, and for fighting the NRF.

[418] Kazakh political scientist Dosym Satpaev warned that a Taliban takeover could possibly pave a way for other fundamental Islamist forces in an attempt to form a merger state of Central Asia and Afghanistan.