Things are not going well in Afghanistan.

With control of — or a significant presence in — roughly 30 percent of districts across the nation, according to Western and Afghan officials, the Taliban now holds more territory than in any year since 2001, when the puritanical Islamists were ousted from power after the 9/11 attacks.
As of last month, about 7,000 members of the Afghan security forces had been killed this year, with 12,000 injured, a 26 percent increase over the total number of dead and wounded in all of 2014, said a Western official with access to the most recent NATO statistics. Attrition rates are soaring. Deserters and injured Afghan soldiers say they are fighting a more sophisticated and well-armed insurgency than they have seen in years.

The failure of Afghan forces is requiring increasing support by U.S. Special Operations troops.
There are several reason why, after fourteen years and trillions of dollars, we are no closer to victory in Afghanistan than we were in 2001.
A good example of one of those reason can be found here.

Afghan militiamen beheaded four Islamic State (ISIS) militants near the Pakistani border on Sunday, showing the severed heads to a country-wide condemnation.
A news report by AFP said that the militiamen were loyal to Afghanistan's deputy parliament speaker Haji Zahir.

Who are the good guys again?
Recall that we pushed the Taliban out of power in 2001 by backing northern warlords who were guilty of countless human rights violations. In fact, their excessive brutality and thievery was the reason for the rise of the Taliban in the first place.

Another reason why things are going poorly in Afghanistan can be found in this story about the battle for Helmand province, where the Taliban have seized 10 of the 14 districts.

The losses are due as much to poor leadership of the Afghan army and police as to Taliban strengths. Corruption, desertion, “ghost soldiers” whose salaries are claimed by fraudulent commanders, and other problems have hampered efforts to stem the Taliban advance. But there is no question that the insurgent movement has poured resources into Helmand.
Their focus can be explained partly in economic terms. Afghanistan produces most of the world’s opium, and Helmand is the biggest single centre for production in the country, so whoever calls the shots in the province can get a sizeable share of drug business.

That is exactly how it sounds. This is a battle between the Taliban drug cartel and the Kabul drug cartel, and we are sacrificing our soldiers in order to keep one of the drug cartels in power.
This isn't something new. From the 1950's to the 1970's, the CIA funded and supported opium warlords/drug lords in Laos, as long as they fought the communists. We did the same with cocaine barons in Honduras during the 1980's. All that is different today is the massive scale and our direct involvement.

Afghanistan today is a narco state ruled by drug lords. In fact, it might be the worst narco state in history, supplying 90% of the world's opium.

"What has happened in Afghanistan over the last 13 years has been the flourishing of a narco-state that is really without any parallel in history," Aikins says. "This is something that is extraordinary, that is catastrophic, that has grave danger for the future and yet there has been virtually no discussion of in recent years."

The idea of sacrificing the lives of our young men to defend drug lords would be so abhorrent that the American people would immediately shut down the war effort...if only our politicians and mainstream news media would utter this awful truth.
Instead we have a conspiracy of silence.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan remains the least developed nation in Asia. Which just indicates that hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were stolen by the local drug lords/politicians that we are defending.