…in Afghanistan
"When the Afghanistan war was launched twenty-five years ago last month, there was no indication that it would become the longest conflict in U.S. history. The Taliban regime collapsed in two months, and a new government was in place in three. The light-footprint U.S. strategy in which special operations forces and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) teams enabled local militias seemed revolutionary, and a smart counterpoint to the plodding, brutal Soviet war of the 1980s. But then, the U.S. war, too, plodded, through two decades of waxing and waning U.S. attention, until U.S. troops were finally flown out of Kabul's international airport in 2021 in defeat.
Could it have turned out differently? Iraq, after all, had turned the corner in 2008, helped by a strategic decision by President George W. Bush to surge additional troops. But Afghanistan had—and continues to have—far weaker state institutions than Iraq. When the United States invaded, it was the third, possibly fourth, chapter in a decades-long civil war that started after the communist coup of 1978—and arguably even earlier, after King Mohammad Zahir Shah was overthrown in 1973. Afghanistan may have been a less violent war than Iraq, but it was much more hopeless.
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, however, American resources were available. The war might have been won. It was lost because of several discrete choices made by the international community, the Afghan government, and most of all the United States. Drawing these choices out of America's longest war is necessary to avoid similar mistakes in the future…"
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Armand
bases up the rifle teams.
