Afghanistan was a mismanaged war. Perhaps even more so than Iraq II. Afghanistan was never a good candidate for a permanent nation-building exercise, and trying to do that was a waste of time, manpower and money. Believe me, I dreamt the dream of bringing a modern government to the Afghan people, but it just wasn’t ready for it.
Doing it while ALSO letting Pakistan act as a safe harbor was triple-stupid. Imagine a fight where everytime you get the upper hand, your opponent can just step across the line to rest and you have to stand there and do nothing. That’s what the Taliban did for 20 years because the Pakistani intelligence agencies were pro-Taliban.
Worse still, the US never REALLY committed to winning the war. It never had sufficient manpower to pacify the country. Instead, it was forced to rely on local warlords whose interests could best be described as “enemy of my enemy”, but they never wanted a modern government because they would lose power in such a government. But the US fetishized local involvement despite amply evidence that it wasn’t going to produce the self-sufficient western govt they dreamt of.
Iraq was a better candidate because it at least had a history of modernism and an educated middle class. But again, the US never committed sufficient forces except for a BRIEF window during the Bush ‘surge’ at the end of his term, but that was too little/too late. They never had a coherent plan for how to build the nation up, and how to convince the major players that this new governement was in their interest.
I think a great approach would have been to change how Oil Money was distributed. The govt oil ministry should distribute all revenues to their citizens directly as taxable income. Those who serve in the military/police would get a slightly larger share. Only native born citizens and lifelong residents are eligible. The entire process should use TWO outside international firms to audit the process for transparency and to avoid corruption. This would have given every citizen a substantial incentive to protect the new democracy while also undoing the usual resource-economy curse.
But back to Afghanistan, yes, we should have pulled out. And it should have been sooner than we did. But the pullout process should have been more orderly and less about Biden waking up one day and setting an arbitrary date. Leaving translators and such behind, and other mistakes were just unbelievable.