Fighting has pushed Oruzgan to the edge and the news is startling. To think the Afghan province where Australians did most of their fighting and dying, in what was our longest war, could fall to the enemy.
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But in many ways, the collapse is not surprising. And it's too early to draw comparisons between the shock advance of Islamic State in Iraq a year ago and what Afghanistan's future might hold.
Remember, Australia's goal in Oruzgan was never to pacify the province. The aim was to build a local Afghan army able do the fighting, a very different objective. There was always going to be violence.
Does the Taliban gains in recent weeks mean Australia failed? Like Afghanistan itself, the answer is a very complicated: "no and yes".
Australia succeeded in getting local forces to standard widely referred to in military circles as "Afghan good enough", or "Afghan right". That's another way of saying well short of perfect. As individual soldiers, or in small groups, the Afghan army has proved lethal.
But what has changed is the withdrawal of what the military call "enablers" - drones, strike jets and much of the artillery that Western nations deployed.
The Afghan "Special Mission Wing" is a deadly air force but mostly stationed close to the capital Kabul, far from the southern provinces and insurgent strongholds. The Taliban is no longer as fearful of death from the air, so the conflict has transformed. The new normal will involve more close-quarter fighting. That means heavily loses on both sides and a test of morale.
Australia suffered casualties from defectors during the years in Oruzgan and close observers know loyalty in Afghanistan is often bought.
No better was this shown than by the killing in March of Australia's favoured warlord, the Oruzgan police chief Mutiullah Khan, which ended a patronage network and exposed misplaced faith in a single commander.
But Oruzgan remains hostage to far larger dynamics. Former president Hamid Karzai's government had lost all legitimacy, but hopes under the new leadership of Ashraf Ghani suffered from his tendency to micromanage. Afghan's leaders will warn of Islamic State's cancerous spread to the country, but treat this with some scepticism.
While there are undoubtedly radical adherents, mostly the warnings stem from a determination Afghanistan does not again become the "Forgotten War" as the world concentrates on Iraq.
It is obvious Afghans have problems enough.
