In his Washington Post column Fareed Zakaria tries to dig into the lessons we should have learned from our experience in Afghanistan:
What explains how so much energy, effort, blood and treasure yielded so little? The report lists many reasons — incoherent strategy, lack of patience, unrealistic expectations, insufficient monitoring — all of which shine a light on specific failures. One of the report’s conclusions is that U.S. goals were often contradictory. For example, the United States pumped billions of dollars into the economy while trying to end corruption. It wanted to weaken warlords and militias, yet would also rely on them when it wanted to establish security quickly. It wanted to end opium production, but not take away farmers’ incomes.
But these do not feel as if they get at the core of the problem. After its defeat in 2001, the Taliban regrouped and steadily gained ground from approximately 2005 onward. The report documents that “enemy-initiated attacks†rose from about 2,300 in 2005 to almost 23,000 in 2009, and never again dropped below 21,000, despite various changes in U.S. strategy, tactics and troop levels.
The key point, as he touches on later in the column, is that the Taliban were Afghans fighting to secure their own view of Afghanistan. We were invaders. To put it in more contemporary terms, the Taliban were the Ukrainians. We were the Russians. It didn’t matter that some of the things we were fighting for, like educating Afghanistan’s women, were good things which some Americans continue to lament are beyond our grasp. They weren’t what the Taliban or, indeed, many Afghans wanted. That some Afghans did want these things is also irrelevant. There were always plenty who were willing to fight to prevent them.
And they would continue to be there in one, two, five, ten years. We always had one foot out the door.
I don’t believe that any lessons were learned in Afghanistan because you can’t be open to learning when you think you have all of the answers.
How can you forget all of he optimistic reports that came back from our military about how well the training was working and how the Afghanis were close to being able to function with minimal assistance on our part? Anyway, I am semi-hopeful that we actually did learn some stuff. Its at least acceptable to make the point that nation building and relying upon the military to do it is not a good idea.
Steve
The MIC’S goals , raison de l’existence, are not your goals.
The military is co-dependent with the armament mills and the keepers of the deficit spending which feeds them both.
You want them to keep you safe don’t you?
At one time we at least didn’t want to know what was done in our name, now we take pride in tales of ginsu drones and “precision strikesâ€.
Meant mainly to demonstrate effective product to prospective customers. That is, allies.
Afghanistan kept the munitions and money flowing for 20 years with barely a peep of protest on the home front.
A resounding success even when compared with the marathon run in Vietnam.