Afghanistan & Egypt in the time of the plague

[DVexile]

I'm not saying it would have ensured a different outcome, but it definitely could not have ended any worse than what we have today.

Not trying to derail into a political discussion as I hope the following observation is apolitical, but when considering alternate realities it actually is quite possible that it could have ended up worse and we already saw it in the 1990’s - protracted civil war pounding civilians in Kabul for years on end only to have the Taliban eventually take over anyway.  Same end state just tens of thousands more dead getting to that point.  Counterintuitively if the Taliban was going to eventually prevail this was probably the best way. And clearly soldiers, village elders and religious leaders in the country reached that conclusion themselves in the past few months. 

For difficult to discern reasons that rational and semi-obvious decision never was considered in our intelligence estimates.  Like the flawed structure of the army we tried to build for them based on an American perspective our analysts failed to make the small leap into the decision making framework of a nation ravaged by four decades of war which is actually governed locally by actors who have been selected over the years by survival through adroitly knowing when to avoid battle or switch sides.  Combine that with a weak and largely illegitimate central government and it’s hard to imagine an outcome other than rapid capitulation.  Either you are in a position to win overwhelmingly or you fold immediately - there likely wasn’t going to be an intermediate outcome - and yet intermediate outcomes were the prevailing forecast.

So anyway, I think the perspective you summarize is spot on but is also just one of many examples in which the US failed to make much of an effort to actually understand Afghanistan’s people, history and realpolitik.

Sigh…