Leadership Quote by Bulent Ecevit

Power doesn’t always conquer; sometimes it just tidies up the mess left by everyone else. Ecevit’s line reads like a blunt field report on state failure: “armies” plural, fragmented forces “fighting each other,” and then a single actor - the Taliban - exploiting that vacuum to impose rule. The emphasis isn’t on Taliban strength so much as on everyone else’s weakness. It’s a politician’s way of redirecting attention from ideology to mechanics: when authority splinters, the most disciplined faction inherits the country.

The syntax does some of the argument’s work. By piling “the armies” and “all of those armies” into a breathless repetition, he evokes chaos as an overwhelming quantity, not a coherent opponent. The Taliban “took advantage” is carefully chosen: it implies opportunism rather than inevitability, a move made possible by conditions others created. That framing carries subtext aimed beyond Afghanistan. Coming from a Turkish leader shaped by Cold War alignments and the anxieties of regional spillover, it doubles as a cautionary note about proxy wars, militia politics, and the seductive promise of order after civil conflict.

Context matters: post-Soviet Afghanistan was a showcase of how external intervention and internal factionalism can hollow out institutions so thoroughly that “rule” becomes less about legitimacy than about ending the gunfire. Ecevit’s intent is pragmatic, even slightly accusatory: stop pretending the outcome was a mystery. When competing armed groups turn a nation into a battlefield, the most organized absolutists don’t need to win hearts - they just need to outlast the infighting.