[…] Those were important two decades of smoldering ruin of American foreign policy—four presidents, six administrations, untold Afghan dead, 2,456 American dead, 20,752 American wounded, and some trillions of dollars spent, the money as uncountable as the Afghan dead and just as meaningless except as an aggregate. Deniers will emerge in the decades to come, so a final set of pedestrian images of failure are necessary to rebuke them in advance. History is not kind; no softening is warranted considering the scale and scope of the folly. […]
Here’s the bottom line up front, as the military likes to say: The SIGAR report mentioned Iraq, where a similar nation-building effort failed for similar reasons, only three times in 60 pages, once a footnote. Nobody has learned any lessons; as the “blob” salivates over rebuilding Ukraine even as this is written, it is doubtful that any lessons will be carried forward from Afghanistan. […]
Left unspoken by SIGAR was the fact that the Taliban saw just the opposite—that eventually, someday, maybe in a long time but not indefinitely, the Americans would have to leave: same as Alexander the Great, same as the British, same as the Soviets. That is one of the wonderful things about the SIGAR report: its historical portability. Change the dates and some adjacent facts and it reads well to describe the British ouster, or the Russian. The failure to win hearts and minds, the great costs to create the appearance of conquering great swaths of territory, the ability of the Afghan plains to absorb the blood of the conquerors, the endemic corruption of the puppet governments: It’s all similar enough. Läs artikel