Yes but it is not a case of forming 2 strait lines on the field of honour and charging towards each other to the beat of the drummer.
Afghanistan is a big place with lots of steep mountain passes very little in the way of safe fast high traffic volume roads and no railway .
Most of those troops were stationed around Kabul and presidential palaces .
And as said before without the air support the regulars were sitting ducks
Add to that the regulars had everything to live for while the Taliban had everything to die for .
The West ( and that includes OZ ) should have been training helicoper & air to ground fighter pilots and supplying aircraft.
No shortage of obsolete aircraft but helicopters area bit tricky to fly due to the thinner air and massive thermals .
The government was even more corrupt than the Shar of Iran's administration so there was little public faith in it .
And add to that the very strong tribalism of the local warlords who never really were part of the government .
The Afghan's by and large do not see themselves as Afghan's rather they identify with their local tribal cultures so the country was never really united. There are better than 100 tribal groupings speaking around 60 different languages.
It is exactly the same situation as in Arabia , Iraqe , Iran , Syria etc etc etc peoples who do not see themselves as a nation being told by others that they are now a country.
And remember the Taliban came from the Mujahideen who successfully tossed out the Russians and before the West armed them with modern weapons they were quite successful against the British using hand made rifles with black powder & shot , not much more soficticated then the weaponary of the civil war .
The population by and large resented the government & the US troops that supported them which is most evident by the prevelance of IED's .
The locals would have seen them being laid so were either too scared to do anything about it or supported the actions .
For the people living a few miles from the capital cities, nothing had changed.
They had been promised a new modern Afghanistan but 5 miles from most capital cities, no roads, no water , no sewerage , no electricity , no phones , no police , no courts, no garbage collection, no schools , no medical care & no jobs apart from being in the army.
The western troops came in & burned the opium crops then told the farmers to grow food , but failed to protect the said same farmers who had been paid up front by the Taliban ( & others ) to grow opium .
IT is a mess and will probably go the same way as it did with the last Taliban government where as soon as the Russians left started fighting between each other because
" the enemy of my enemy is my friend so long as my enemy remains their enemy ".
The old disputes between Afghanistan & Pakistan will start to flare up again because like Turkey & the Kurds, the border cuts a 1/3 off the Pashtun homeland & the Pashtun's see themselves as Pashtun's , not Pakistani's or Afghans they speak their own language and practice a pre modern Islam called Pashtunwali .
So once the US is gone they will start to form seperatist movements from Pakistan probably aided by the Indians .
As an aside the word khaki comes from Pashtun which means "of the earth" and the British army officially changed from their red coats to khaki drab during their occupation of Afghanistan
because the tribal warriours had no problem seeing them & shooting the commanding officers who could easily be distinguished from the general troops .
