
Retired US Army Gen. Wesley Clark, a former NATO supreme allied commander, told CNN's Rosemary Church that despite the Taliban having committed to an opaque "general amnesty" for all Afghans, the group has "a long track record of doing the opposite."
"The people of Afghanistan, they don't trust it," Clark said.
Clark also explained why he believes the Afghan military fell so quickly to the Taliban. He explained that many of the foot soldiers that make up the military saw the job as a paycheck, not a cause. The Afghan National Army was formed after the fall of the Taliban, made up of various tribes and factions that historically did not always get along.
Here's how Clark explained it:
"The truth is that these people in Afghanistan have been through this before. This is a country that's been at war for 40 years. People signed up with the Afghan military to make money. They fired their weapons. Did they want to die in service of the Afghan military? Remember, Afghanistan is not a conventional nation. It's really tribal. And so they were earning a paycheck -- some of them didn't even get that paycheck -- but they did not sign up to fight to the death, for the most part."
"This is an old Afghan trick -- they go with the winners, or at least they run away form the losers, and that's why it happened so quickly. No whether that could have been anticipated or not, we'll just have to wait and see."