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The is the second of two columns about some of the lessons learned, or not, in America's longest war. The firstTrump, Afghanistan, and The Tweet of Damocles can be read here.

PARISUnless President Donald Trump decides to end the Afghan war with a bangwith tens of millions killed, as he has threatened more than onceit is going to end with a whimper, if it ends at all.

Its not victory, says counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen. It isnt ticker-tape and Broadway.

It should be said that what Kilcullen and others consider the best option looks like the one Trump is pursuing just now: a reduction of U.S. forces on the ground to an easily sustainable level of about 9,000, while negotiating to get the Taliban into direct talks, eventually, with the U.S.-backed Afghan government. But after 18 years of a war that has cost $2 trillion and the lives of more than 2,400 U.S. soldiers, such an inconclusive conclusion may not satisfy even an exhausted American publicmuch less the egotistical Mr. Trump.

As he runs for re-election touting his promises kept, the president is going to want something that looks like the definitive end that he's vowed he'll deliver to this endless war. Perhaps there will be some bit of political theater like Trump's incredibly ill-conceived and eventually rescinded invitation to Taliban leaders to come to the United States only days before the anniversary of 9/11 so he could claim his own Camp David Accords. Or, more likely, hell just pull the plug.

Thus Kilcullens memorable phrase, picked up from a U.S. Special Forces operator with rueful experience in Syria, This whole operation is sitting under the tweet of Damocles. Or, putting it another way, Trump wakes up, he sees something on Fox and Friends, gets out of the wrong side of the bed, doesnt like it, says, Fuck it, were pulling out. And I think thats a problem.

In any case, the Taliban know how badly Trump wants out, and they can play with that.

But if by some miracle the current policy of minimal U.S. presence, tough talks, and supposedly unlimited patience does hold, what are some of the strategies and tactics that should be employed going forward? What needs to be done to help Afghanistan become a stable country free of terrorists who might threaten the United States or its citizens? What lessons learned from the past?

For this and the previous column, I called up both Kilcullen, a well-known Australian soldier-scholar who worked with the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who served as the Americans top diplomat in Afghanistan in 2002 and again in 2011 and 2012.

"Have you ever seen the movie I Am Legend with Will Smith?" Kilcullen asked me. I said I had, vaguely recalling a post-apocalyptic thriller and wondering where this was going.

Theres that scene, said Kilcullen, where the sun goes down and hes checking his watch because the vampires are going to come out and eat him. Well, I wish I had a dollar for every time I have been out in an Afghan district in the late afternoon with an Afghan government official, and the guy starts checking his watch. And the reason is, they dont live there. They dont live in the districts that they govern, because they know if they try to spend one single night in the area that they are officially in charge of the vampires are going to come out and eat them.

Finding a way to reconnect the Afghan government with people at the local level is essential to stabilizing the country, Kilcullen suggested, and corruption made that almost impossible when the U.S. was pumping more money into the place than anyone knew how to handle:

Vast amounts of gringo cash come into Afghanistan, that fuels an economy of corruption, Kilcullen told me. Instability leads to money coming in which leads to corruption which leads to abuse which leads to more people supporting the insurgents which leads to more instability, and you get this sort of self-licking ice cream cone.

If you wanted to be an Afghan police chief you would have to buy that position and it would cost you about 250,000 American dollars.

David Kilcullen

Ambassador Crocker, for his part, is quoted extensively in the U.S. governments lessons learned documents recently published by The Washington Post under the damning headline, At War With The Truth: Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption, Crocker said in 2015 when interviewed by a team from the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, its somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it.

Over the phone last week, Crocker added,There were no controls except our own, which obviously didnt go far enough. And there was plenty of corruption and waste among Americans as well. He said many thought, Hey, U.S. rules no longer apply. Lets get rich.

In about 2010, Kilcullen looked at bribery among Afghan police in the south of the country. If you wanted to be an Afghan police chief you would have to buy that position and it would cost you about 250,000 American dollars, Kilcullen said. And then you would have to pay every month up the chain of command all the way to Kabul about 50 grand in kickbacks... Imagine how much money you are making from bribes and shakedowns and targeting the population just to make your payment and also make a profit.

The U.S. is still spending taxpayer billions in Afghanistan, a country of 30 million people whose entire gross domestic product is only some $21 billion. This year military aid amounts to about $5 billion, while foreign assistance to civilian projects is about $633 millionstill big numbers, but less than half of what they were a decade ago.

Looking back, Kilcullen said that of $133 billion in reconstruction funds all told, Id say conservatively 20 to 30 percent went directly to the enemy. It was bad. But were not doing that anymore. Its a historical lessons learned, but its not relevant to now.

The investment we have in Afghanistan now is perfectly tuned, said Crocker.

But what of the local corruption? The shakedowns, the intimidationthe kind of thing that Kilcullen witnessed with the police and with regional officials looking at their watches in the late afternoon? His answer is surprising.

Until local government people are capable, respected, effective, Kilcullen said, the disconnect from the local population is not going to be solved. And frankly the only way I can see that happening in much of the country is for those local government people to effectively be Taliban. Thats a side effect of a successful political process, whereby you integrate Taliban into the structure.

The common rap on the Afghan National Army is that its soldiers dont want to serve, and they dont fight. There, too, corruption has been a huge problem with officers pocketing the salaries of troops who arent required to report for duty, so-called ghost soldiers. But the real problem is the casualty rate among those who do fight and do die: some 45,000 killed since 2015 as opposed to fewer than 60 American troops.

The problem is not that we cant sustain it, said Kilcullen. The problem is that the Afghans as they are currently fighting cannot sustain itthey cant sustain their own loss rate. Among the reasons: We did not put enough effort soon enough into the Afghan Air Force, so we started that very late in the game. And they are still very reliant on air power for things like medical evacuation, reconnaissance, battlefield transport, that kind of stuff, and they find it really hard to fight without those assets.

To make matters worse, says Kilcullen, the campaign against the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq diverted many of those resources.

There are ways to lower the loss rates among the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, says Kilcullen. But again, its all moot, because if the president wakes up and says, Fuck it, we are leaving, youve got to struggle to execute that strategy.

Afghanistan has become the worlds biggest producer of opium. It produces some 80 percent of the worlds illicit supply, despite $10 billion spent trying to eradicate or replace the poppy crops. The Taliban make a lot of money in the narcotics business, but they are not the only players.

What can be done better? Kilcullen proposes some unconventional solutions since the conventional ones have been such stunning failures.

I think it was a mistake to send our ground troops in a counterinsurgency role, including the Afghan troops, out to support counter-narcotics, says Kilcullen. If you are doing a counterinsurgency campaign and you are told you need to be eradicating poppy crops you will eradicate the crops that you can get to, which by definition will be the crops that are in accessible areas, which by definition means they are more likely to be crops owned by people who are broadly pro-government. So you are actually creating an incentive for people not to back the government and to back the insurgents, because that keeps the [Afghan National Army] out of their area and their crops arent going to be destroyed.

The other thing is I think we blame the farmer too much, he said, offering a little paean to what he called the amazing poppy. Its a medicine that is traditional in Afghanistan that people use to treat their kids. Its a product that keeps forever, it requires no refrigeration and never goes bad. Its tradable for currency and is the closest thing to hard cash in large parts of Afghanistan. And more importantly it grows on any piece of broken ground. It doesnt require a lot of water. It doesnt require any fertilizer, unlike virtually any other crop in Afghanistan, and the customer will pay you for it up front and pick it up from the farm gate. Its basically a perfect crop.

By targeting the farmer, says Kilcullen, you are pissing a guy off for just being logical and trying to follow his own interests. A much better way to think about dealing with it is interdiction, orthere was even an NGO in Afghanistan for years that put forward the entirely sensible policy that we should just buy all the opium, and pay the farmer a fair wage for it, and send it into a government-controlled monopoly. Then we can always just burn it out at sea if we wanted or we could feed it into the [legitimate] international economy. But we should take over and control the economy of opium rather than let the Taliban turn it into support for the insurgency.

If there is general agreement that negotiations with the Taliban are desirable, the question of who should do the talking is not so clear. Several sessions of U.S.-Taliban negotiations in Qatar over the last year were conducted without any participation by the Afghan government at all. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad hammered out an agreement that would have included the staged withdrawal of all U.S. troops (an "evacuation," as the Taliban put it) and only then were they going to consent to talk with the government of President Ashraf Ghani. The result was the Camp David fiasco. Now talks have resumed, but theyre on again and off again.

The Taliban conceded early on that they would not be harboring terrorists like al Qaeda or the South Asian version of the Islamic State, but that's a matter of self interest. Such groups now compete with the Taliban for radical Islamic cred and help to divide its already fractious organization. Trump may eventually hold up such a promise as a mission-accomplished momentonce again he has defeated terrorist. But how can Taliban promises be verified if there are no more Americans on the ground?

The Afghan government could complicate such a deal by demanding something more solid than the flimsy exit pass being discussed thus far. So, Crocker said hes not against negotiations. I just profoundly believe that negotiating without the Afghan government is surrender.

What Kilcullen calls a theoretically viable strategy is to make clear to the Taliban in no uncertain terms that there is no timeline, that we are not leaving, and that they cant wait us out. At the same time, concentrate on developing the intelligence and aviation abilities of the Afghan forces, with less emphasis on U.S. airpower. Weve been trying to bomb the Taliban to the negotiating table, said Kilcullen. Thats killing a lot of civilians.

The better strategy, he suggests, is to say convincingly, You want us to leave? Until you guys are willing to negotiate a deal we are not leaving. I think there is a way to wait them out as opposed to bombing them to the negotiating table.

But all this is theoretical because we have a chief executive problem, said Kilcullen. Around the world, Trump's threats of fire and fury are not taken seriously at this point, and neither are his promises of patient, persistent commitment, especially in Afghanistan.

I think absent President Trump you could make the case, and I think you could probably make it in a way that the American people would understand. U.S. casualties are very low, spending is way down, life has improved for many Afghans living in the cities, and especially for Afghan women.

Lets be clear, Crocker wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last Friday. We came to Afghanistan and remain there now for one essential reason: the United States national security. But what serves that interest? I have argued that a better life for people in a misgoverned country is an essential part of that effort. It is also about American values. What is it, exactly, about nation-building that we must avoid at all costs? Does it extend to looking in the eyes of a hopeful Afghan girl of kindergarten age and saying, Sorry, kid. Youre on your own?

In the mercenary age of MAGA, sadly, talk about defending American values abroad has come to sound almost nave, but that is one thing Crocker, after service as a top diplomat in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, is not.

What scares me about Trump, Crocker told me over the phone, is when he gets something in his mind, he can get beaten back, but it will come at you again. He doesnt drop it. And we saw that in Syria. Trump wanted to get all the U.S. troops out of thereonly a few thousandand he reconsidered after Defense Secretary James Mattis and Special Envoy Brett McGurk resigned a year ago. The military meanwhile were telling him the move was dog-ass dumb, as Crocker put it. But then boom, 10 months later he is back at it again. Thats where he is on Afghanistan, and I am really afraid he is going to pull the plug.

Crocker pointed to the recent prisoner swap with the Taliban. An American and an Australian hostage were traded for three Taliban prisoners. Trump tweeted: Lets hope this leads to more good things on the peace front like a ceasefire that will help end this long war. Proud of my team! But one of the released Taliban, Hajji Mali Khan, is reputed to be among their best field commanders.

So we let this guy loose with no ceasefire, said Crocker, and our guys are going to die. I think it speaks to the fact this White House just wants to get the hell out.

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Trump's Afghanistan Policy? Talk Tough, Then Just Pull the Plug - The Daily Beast

Everything is so screwed up at this point that its hard to find anything about our politics or our government that doesnt look like it was designed by an unholy hybrid of Edsel Ford and Mr. Natural. Ever since we opened the shebeen, we have had one simple question about the continuing United States military involvement in Afghanistan, in which it has been involved longer than it ever has been involved anywhere elsenamely, what exactly are we still doing there?

So, last week, the Washington Post published the equivalent of The Pentagon Papers in which we learn that all or most of our leaders for the past decade and a half dont know either, but that they were not any more inclined to share that with us than were McNamara, and Abrams, and the rest of those guys back in the 1960s.

Or, as was said by a certain former Democratic candidate for president, how do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?

HOSHANG HASHIMIGetty Images

This has been a bipartisan cock-up right from jump. None of the three administrations involved in it comes out of this report looking like people youd trust to wash your car. One trillion bucks and climbing, and what have we learned? Basically, that we havent learned anything. It took the Post three years to pry these documents loose (and theres nothing that Post editor Marty Baron likes better than prying documents loosejust ask the Archdiocese of Boston), and we find that the old Vietnam Syndrome wasnt kicked very far during our walkover wars in the 1980s and 1990s.

Frankly, and maybe its because I persist in believing that the activism of the 1960s actually accomplished something lasting, I cant believe that weve gone down this road again. Hell, weve made hit movies about the Pentagon Papers. That was a watershed. Everybody learned a lesson from those documents, right?

And, of course, the most damning thing about these revelations is that they vanished from the media almost immediately, lost in the din of the barely organized crazy that this administration has brought to Washington. This was a monumental scoop, the result of dogged work by the entire news operation of the Washington Post, and most people know far more about Giulianis insane overseas ramblings than know anything about the archived failure and waste present here.

Everything is awful.

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I Just Can't Believe We Went Down This Road Again - Esquire

Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Via Apple Podcasts | Via RadioPublic | Via Stitcher

For nearly two decades, U.S. officials crafted a careful story of progress to justify an ongoing military campaign in Afghanistan. Newly disclosed documents reveal to what extent that story was not the reality of the war. Today, a former Marine who is now a New York Times reporter speaks about the missteps that the government concealed for years.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

The Daily is made by Theo Balcomb, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Alexandra Leigh Young, Jonathan Wolfe, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Adizah Eghan, Kelly Prime, Julia Longoria, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Jazmn Aguilera, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Austin Mitchell, Sayre Quevedo, Monika Evstatieva, Neena Pathak and Dave Shaw. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Stella Tan, Julia Simon and Lauren Jackson.

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A Secret History of the War in Afghanistan - The New York Times

Its easy to criticize the American effort in Afghanistan. Among its many shortcomings, Washington has vacillated across numerous ineffective strategies, failed to fully account for the geopolitical constraints of the conflict, and consistently prioritized expediency over effectiveness. But did U.S. officials pervasively lie to the American people about the war? The Washington Post seems to think so, as evidenced by the first sentence of its Afghanistan Papers articles published last week: A confidential trove of government documents reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. Its no surprise that the series has gotten a fair amount of attention.

But is that claim accurate? Unfortunately, its not. The story the Post is telling is neither wholly true, nor supported by the documents it published. Instead, the Posts reporting puts sensationalist spin on information that was not classified, has already been described in publicly-available reports, only covers a fraction of the 18 years of the war, and falls far short of convincingly demonstrating a campaign of deliberate lies and deceit.

The Government Has Published Numerous Reports Critical of the Afghanistan War

The documents the Post was able to obtain are transcripts and notes from interviews conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known more commonly as SIGAR. These interviews were conducted as part of SIGARs lessons learned program, whose goal is to identify and preserve lessons from the U.S. reconstruction experience in Afghanistan, and to make recommendations to Congress and executive agencies on ways to improve [U.S.] efforts in current and future operations. Importantly, the interviews the Post obtained were conducted between 2014 and 2018, in many cases years after the people being interviewed left their positions of authority. In addition, they were conducted off the record, not for attribution, and at the unclassified (as opposed to confidential, secret, or top secret) level. And, they were used as data for the production of the eight lessons learned reports that SIGAR has already published and are available via its website.

Since 2007, I have in some form or fashion been involved in assessing progress in the war in Afghanistan whether as an analyst embedded within the International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Central Command, or as the leader of various independent assessments of Afghan security forces and the United States overall strategy for the war. Throughout this time, I have had the unique experience of having been interviewed by SIGAR several times for its lessons learned projects, and I have conducted exactly these types of interviews for them in support of one of their lessons learned efforts. I can therefore say with confidence that these interviews contain a mix of three types of information: interviewees recollections of historical actions and events (which may or may not exactly correspond to what actually happened); their opinions on what they saw, heard, sensed, and did (or didnt) do while in their position of authority; and reflections on their own experience (which are often delivered in an air of catharsis). Because these interviews are conducted well after the fact and are off the record, interviewees are often especially candid and willing to explore their own failures and those of others, with the understanding that doing so is for the greater and future good of American policy and security, and will not directly be made public.

Thus, it is no surprise that what the Post got was a lot of post-factual reminiscing and salacious quotes, which it has been using for effect. But are its headlines accurately representing the information it has? The answer is no. Take, for example, its claim that U.S. officials have consistently lied to the American people about progress in the Afghanistan war. By my count, in the Posts article specifically laying out this claim, it includes quotes from 17 interviewees. In a newspaper article that may seem like a lot, but in fact it is a mere 3 percent of the total number of documents it has. While some of the quotes the Post uses are salacious in nature, are they truly representative of a consistent theme of lying throughout the documents the Post received, or are they the views of a fringe group? To accurately back up their claim of a campaign of deliberate deceit, some form of thematic and textual analysis would need to be done to demonstrate the pervasiveness of this theme. The Posts article makes no attempt to do so.

Further, to convincingly demonstrate a pattern of willful lies and deceit, one would need to show that U.S. authorities were making such decisions in real time. Policy memos, transcripts of official U.S. policy discussions, and sensitive communications among senior authorities (the vast majority of which would be classified) would be needed as evidence of such decisions. Yet, the Post has only one data source for this a number of memos it obtained from Donald Rumsfelds archives. True, these memos are from the Secretary of Defense and they do call into question the wisdom of some decisions made during his tenure. But they also cover less than a third of the Afghanistan war (2001-2006) and they do not present a comprehensive picture of what was happening in other parts of the U.S. government (especially the White House). To convincingly paint a picture of the U.S. government as consistently and pervasively at war with the truth in Afghanistan, a much more representative trove of information would be needed.

The Afghanistan Papers are Not the Pentagon Papers

The Post seems to implicitly recognize this when it attempts to draw a comparison of the interviews it received to the infamous Pentagon Papers. This comparison is disingenuous, however, for three reasons. First, the Pentagon Papers consisted of far more information than what the Post has (they were 47 volumes of over 7,000 pages). Second, those papers consisted of analysis stemming from a comprehensive and representative set of internal memos and official policy documents from senior U.S. authorities that were captured in real time. And third, they were highly classified (at the level of top secret). What the Post has are interviews that were conducted after the fact, at an unclassified (though off the record) level, and were used as data for reports that are already available to the public.

Here again I will turn to my own experience. My personal observations during the roughly 12 years I have been working on assessments of the Afghanistan war are that U.S. officials have not generally engaged in a deliberate campaign of lies and deceit of the American public when it came to progress in the war. Rather, what Ive observed is shifting (and often unclear or arguably unachievable) strategic and policy objectives combined with aggressive optimism and an overwhelming can do attitude on the part of U.S. government officials especially within the military given its rigid hierarchy, and culture of following orders and vertical appeasement (as described here). In addition, the U.S. government and particularly the Department of Defense has consistently struggled with its own doctrine, processes, approaches, and bureaucracy doing its thing type challenges to assessing these non-conventional wars, as I have endeavored to show along with a host of other authors such as Ben Connable and Stephen Downes-Martin.

The combination of these factors has more often than not resulted in a situation in which U.S. officials were asked to provide their assessments of progress toward murky outcomes using primarily their own judgment. In real time, it is therefore not at all surprising that their assessments would typically follow the pattern of progress having been made, with many challenges remaining. It is also not surprising that in hindsight, many of these officials would recognize that their efforts accomplished less overall than they had hoped they would in real time. Does that make them liars? No. Does it mean they were delusional or professionally negligent? Some might argue so, while citing things like intelligence assessments as controverting evidence to these officials own assessments. In my view, however, the vast majority of these officials were not lying or delusional they were aggressively pursuing objectives that were mostly incoherent or unachievable and doing their best to make sense of information that was, as a result, often conflicting or incoherent itself. As I often tell people who ask for my help with assessing progress, if you dont know where youre going, its very hard to tell if youve gotten there, but movement in any direction will feel like youre getting closer.

Sometime in the future when the policy memos, intelligence products, and independent assessments are declassified and the full extent of the U.S. governments internal deliberations are known publicly, the conclusion drawn by historians will be different than that drawn by the Post. While it is scintillating to read of allegedly-scandalous behavior on the part of U.S. officials in charge of various aspects of the war, the general and pervasive reality is far less conspiratorial our inability to accurately assess and convey progress (or lack thereof) in the war was mostly a symptom of not having a clear and consistent vision of what we were doing and why, combined with an aggressively optimistic, can do culture within our implementing departments and agencies (the military especially) and an over-reliance on self-assessment. A key point here is that these aspects themselves are systemically problematic and deserving of deep analysis and introspection exactly the kind that is evident in SIGARs lessons learned interviews and its already-published reports. Yet, rather than helping us address those issues, the Posts reporting will make it harder to do this going forward. Now that everyone knows their interviews are likely to be made public and potentially used to make conspiratorial claims against them, the SIGAR lessons learned team will inevitably have curtailed access and candor from current and prior U.S. government officials going forward.

Americans Have Been Let Down, Not Lied To

I applaud efforts by the Post, SIGAR, and others to bring more of the policy discussions, decisions, and mistakes pertaining to the war in Afghanistan into the light. But as in any analysis, the conclusions drawn need to be rigorously justified by the data available. By this standard, the Posts reporting has failed to deliver an accurate portrayal of the available information. It is further disappointing that the head of SIGAR, John Sopko, claimed on record to the Post that the American people have constantly been lied to. Through this statement, Sopko (who has been accused previously of distorting the role of the inspector general and of spinning facts to generate news stories), has significantly undermined his own lessons learned program one that had been adhering to very rigorous analytic sourcing standards. The mission of that effort to understand what the U.S. has done right and wrong in Afghanistan, in hopes of doing better in the future remains valuable but is undercut by both the Posts reporting and Sopkos comments. I hope that both of these actors will engage in their own lessons learned reflections and come to the conclusion that there was no secret war on the truth and, as with everyone else associated with the war in Afghanistan, they have made mistakes that are worth recognizing and learning from.

Dr. Jonathan Schroden is a research program director whose work has focused on counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency activities across much of the Middle East and South Asia. He has served as a strategic advisor to numerous military commands and civilian offices in, or focused on, Iraq and Afghanistan. The views expressed here are his alone. You can find him on Twitter @jjschroden.

Image: U.S. Army (Photo by Master Sgt. Alex Licea)

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There Was No Secret War on the Truth in Afghanistan - War on the Rocks

A reader wrote in about the revelations about U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and how shes changing her mind about what America can actually accomplish when it takes military action overseas.

I hate the idea of standing by while they fill soccer stadiums to stone women, and all of that. I truly hate it. But I think we have proven we cannot really do this. Ive always been more interventionist than isolationist, but I have to admit, the lives weve given, some of them personal friends, the money spent and yet things are just not getting done there.

How do you tell yourself, I did good, I did my best, I wasnt wasting my time in that service, with reports like this? How do you tell yourself your entire career isnt wasted, or even wrong? No wonder military personnel are fighting so many psychological issues now.

I thought we should even have gathered allies for stepping into Darfur, and Afghanistan was just a no-brainer for me, even as I lived with deployments right from the start. Listening to Colin Powell at the time, I thought [the 2003 invasion of] Iraq made sense, even knowing my [loved ones] would go too. I have thought we needed to stand up against tyranny and the use of chemical weapons for Syria against YEARS ago. I believed in the surges. Now I dont know. And I bet Im one of many.

What our post-9/11 history has demonstrated is that the United States has a first-rate military that can tear apart an opposing force thoroughly, quickly, and effectively. But our government, along with the governments of our allies, have not yet figured out how to establish peaceful, unified, stable governments to replace the regimes we topple not just in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Libya and arguably Syria as well. The problem was not that we were too stingy or didnt try hard enough; its that were trying to plant seeds in soil that isnt fertile enough to grow much of anything. (In Afghanistan, this is not merely metaphorical; the U.S. spent $34 million trying to grow soybeans in Afghanistan, despite previous researching the land was ill-suited to that purpose.)

The American public does not have the patience for the decades-long military presence, like in Germany and Japan and South Korea. We can argue that they ought to, and some would argue that the 13 to 16 U.S. personnel killed in Afghanistan each year since 2016 is a relatively small price to pay to ensure Afghanistan doesnt once again become an incubator for terrorists who want to kill as many of us as possible. But the public remains unconvinced . . . that is, when the public stops to think about foreign policy at all. Americans are tired of being in Afghanistan, but the protests against the wars largely stopped once Obama took office.

The grim SIGAR assessment of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan disappeared from the news cycle quickly. As Alex Shephard observes over in The New Republic, one major reason that the Afghanistan Papers have received so comparatively little coverage is that everyone is to blame, which means no one has much of an interest in keeping the story alive. There are no hearings, few press gaggles.

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We Never Figured Out Afghanistan, and No Longer Want to Try - National Review