Ezra Klein has a good column in today's New York Times. Here it is.

Ezra Klein is a journalist, not a military historian, so he did not leap immediately to the conclusion that he instead sneaks up on and still doesn't quite recognize: Regular armies -- by which I mean the professional, highly mechanized First World kind -- are helpless in the face of a determined insurgency.

Quote:
"Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures by pretending to believe in the possibility of a graceful departure. It’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation. But what our ignominious exit really reflects is the failure of America’s foreign policy establishment at both prediction and policymaking in Afghanistan."

In short, the US/NATO effort, as mounted, was doomed from the start. Such nation-building efforts always are, unless the imposing power can secure the cooperation of a super-majority of the population.

In a previous post, up the thread, I wrote that the NATO nations in general, and the United States in particular, are still blinded by their success in the war against Hitler's Third Reich and the Japanese "Co-Prosperity Sphere". This is most apparent in what happens after the invasion.

The reconstruction of West Germany worked because, caught between the Soviets in the east and the western allies stampeding across the Rhine, the vast majority of Germans agreed that it must work, and the small minority who were indissolubly connected to the Nazis were successfully branded as war criminals. These facts gave the occupying powers an exit strategy that -- as I noted before -- only the United States has yet to employ. (Even the British Army of the Rhine is gone.) In Japan, the people were too traumatized by, first, the terrible wastage of the decade of war they had somehow survived and, second, by the horror of two atomic bombs actually dropped and the possibility of more to come.

The British and French experience of the dissolution of their empires should have given pause, but the United States isn't an imperial power, right? RIGHT? So the stuff that happened in Algeria and India and Borneo and Malaya and Ireland and whole whack of other places couldn't possibly apply. Vietnam was obviously a freakish exception driven by Communist pressure.

All the commentators who aren't blowing smoke say something about Westerners not understanding Afghan culture. News flash: it isn't just Afghan culture Westerners don't get. It's the culture of any group with a sufficiently different idea of the good life.