According to a report, released last Sunday by the Wall Street Journal, the Taliban managed to seize power in a very short time last summer, according to a well-studied plan that involved the use of a vast network of intelligence agents and agents sleepers located in the main Afghan cities. Such personnel, loyal to the Taliban, had been wisely infiltrated for many years in institutions (ministries, military and security bodies) and civil society organizations throughout Afghanistan.
On the orders of the Taliban they managed to quickly neutralize, from within the state apparatus, all the opponents of the new regime. According to the Wall Street Journal, many Taliban agents were also present in universities and even within Western-funded humanitarian organizations, particularly those based in the Afghan capital Kabul.
The two authors of the report, Yaroslav Trofimov and Margherita Stancati, spoke about this spy network directly with Mawlawi Mohammad Salim Saad, one of the most influential commanders of the infamous Haqqani network. The Haqqani Network is a Sunni paramilitary group that works alongside the Taliban in the security sector. Saad told the Wall Street Journal that the Taliban spies had assumed the identities of ordinary Afghan citizens. Most of them had been instructed by the Taliban to adopt typical Western customs, such as wearing jeans and shaving their beards..
On August 15, these dormant agents were ordered to reach weapons depots scattered throughout the country and to neutralize the government personnel present there. Among the operational orders received there was also that of preventing government personnel from destroying confidential documents, especially those containing the information of supporters of Western countries present in the territory.
What is certain is that the rapid takeover of the country by the Taliban has displaced all the modern intelligence services of the international coalition because they have not been able to read the real situation of the operational context. An "intelligence failure" proven by the explosive revelation of the report published by the Wall Street Journal.