An Afghanistan post-mortem

Prof. Juan Cole's take, with which I largely agree. Though I think the U.S. stayed in Afghanistan more because war pigs like Rumsfeld psychologically "get off" on it all. And of course some truly loathsome, despicable assholes got richer.

The US in 2002-2003 had a good outcome in Afghanistan. We should just have left then. I can’t imagine why we didn’t. I think then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to surround Russia so it couldn’t reemerge as a peer power. It had nothing to do with Afghanistan.

The US lost Afghanistan in part by trying to occupy it militarily. In 2005 US troops used flamethrowers to burn poppy crops of Afghan farmers, who had nothing else to live on. One in 7 as a result had to sell a daughter. I doubt they have forgiven the US.

If you occupy a country, you have to suppress insurgents. Insurgents come from towns and villages and have friends and relatives there. When insurgents hit a US outpost, the US troops had to go into the nearby village and shake it down, looking for the guerrillas. They’d go into Afghan homes at night, with the women folk rustled from their sleep and standing there bare-faced and in their bed clothes before 18-year-old strangers from Alabama and South Carolina. After a thing like that, the men of the family would have had at least to try to kill some Americans. Search and destroy missions gradually turned people against the US, just as had happened in Vietnam. - Informed Comment