You can melt into the population or you can launch attacks. You can try doing both, but it’s incredibly hard to do so without being caught, not least because by the very act of launching attacks, you put a bullseye on where you have been/are still based.
The Taliban could pull that trick on the US because the US didn’t have organic humint or persistent local level presence. So when the US soldiers came asking locals who was launching attacks, no one would give them them time of day. You think locals would be so hostile to the Taliban? If they were the Americans would never have been driven out
Wannabe terrorists and revolutionaries are a dime a dozen, but how many have the means and will to carry out meaningful attacks, and the skill and discipline to remain undetected while doing so who are on America’s side? If America had such a vast and effective local force, they sure showed amazing restraint on never ever using it even once
So how many bombs have gone off since the Taliban takeover? Not one a week I don’t think.
As i said, it’s not remotely as easy as you seem to think. Especially when the state sponsors of such terror don’t have actual land boarders to support such attacks.
No foreign sponsored revolution/terror campaign have ever succeeded under such circumstances.
True enough that governing is much harder, but we are not talking about governing, we are talking about finding and killing hostile enemy assets. Which I think you are vastly underestimating the Taliban’s effectiveness at.
That’s basically the holy grail of the American occupation effects, to create and grass roots organic local resistance to the Taliban that can stand up to them. Having failed so miserably at this task when they were in country and calling all the shots, what makes you think they can magically pull of this trick now that they have zero physical presence in country?
Let’s see how many actually has the balls to stick their heads up and do something to the Taliban. And how quickly the Taliban literally chop their heads off when they do.
Who ever said there would be zero Chinese casualties? The question isn’t one of whether China can avoid loosing anyone, if that was indeed the objective, then of course China is better off staying at home. The question is whether China, together with active support from the Taliban, can effectively safeguard any potential future Chinese investments and projects inside Afghanistan, to which the answer is very much yes.
Furthermore, any foreign sponsored terrorist attacks against Chinese assets in Afghanistan is almost certainly going to lead to vastly greater losses of deployed assets for said foreign state sponsor(s) of terror.
American CIA operatives and special forces were effectively untouchable in places like Syria because of the US military hard power in the AO, which gives them ultimate escalation dominance. If the Syrians or Russians tried to move of those US assets, they will get spanked hard by the might of the US military.
What is the US gonna do when China drops thousand pound bombs on any CIA missions or SpecOp FoBs in or around Afghanistan when said assets had just drawn first blood against Chinese forces in country?
That’s the unavoidable catch 22, state sponsorship of terrorism isn’t something you can do over zoom. You either need people on the ground to run your little state terror sponsorship deal, or you might as well set all your terror sponsorship money on fire because locals are going to flock to take your money and no one is going to actually go do any terrorism. Because they like living and don’t want to be killed painfully by the Taliban. You put boots on the ground without the means to protect them and those boots on the ground end up as stars on walls and headstones in military cemeteries.
Thats why all past successful foreign sponsored terrorism/revolutionary movements needed active support from a powerful land neighbour. Neither the US or India have that, which means any terrorism they do manage to incite will only be on the scale of annoyance rather than actual existential threat.