The "debacle" was inevitable. The people now pounding the gates at the Kabul airport believed, like most advisors, that the government would hold up for months, maybe a year before collapsing. The panic now comes from the lightning fast implosion of that "army" and government. The Taliban had that implosion teed up for weeks or months and whenever they decided to pull the trigger the swiftness of the collapse would have caught everyone by surprise.