The short answer to a hard question is that the United States (and the allies we dragged in) had no business in Afghanistan in the first place.
Afghanistan is of marginal strategic or geopolitical importance.
While Afghanistan harbored terrorists, so too does nearby Pakistan. But we are not fighting in Pakistan.
Some say we are fighting to protect the freedom of the Afghan people. And that may be partly true, but there are plenty of other oppressed people who merit our support, but we don’t help.
Cuba comes to mind. So does Venezuela.
No one in the Pentagon nor did many in Congress want to leave Afghanistan, mostly because they did not want the evacuation to happen on their watch. Otherwise they really don’t have any good arguments for hanging in there, since nothing was getting better—it was getting worse.
American service members killed in Afghanistan through April: 2,448.
U.S. contractors: 3,846.
Afghan national military and police: 66,000.
Other allied service members, including other NATO member states’: 1,144.
Afghan civilians: 47,245.
We can also ask what it is we created, in the odd but highly unlikely chance that the NATO-backed regime in that country miraculously survives the Taliban onslaught.
Out of 180 countries, Afghanistan ranks as the 177th worst when it comes to corruption according to the Asia Foundation. Put in proper order, the number one top problem of the country is insecurity, followed by corruption, followed by unemployment according to a 2012 survey done in the country by the United Nations and the Afghan High Office of Oversight and Anti-corruption.
There is also the problem of sustainability in the Afghan military. Sometimes it fights, but at other times it either cuts and runs or surrenders. The United States has spent billions on trying to build up and train the Afghan military, but the effort has not really paid off.
It is hard to admit, but it is the truth, that the United States and its NATO partners, and a host of Private Voluntary Organizations (PVOs), sought to impose Western culture on a country that isn’t in the least Western in values and outlook.
Western culture got a foothold in some cities, most notably Kabul, but on the whole it failed to gain a political following strong enough to stand up to the Taliban and their Islamic cause.
More or less what happened at the psychological level in Vietnam, happened in Afghanistan. U.S. forces in Vietnam never trusted the Vietnam military and often treated them as a colonial power might have treated the “locals” in places where, in effect, they were the occupying power.
Something like that happened in Afghanistan, where NATO forces were far from impressed by the Afghan military and in most cases wrote them off and treated them as second-class partners, or worse. These are the kind of fights that become internally asymmetric, and where the toughest fighting is handled by the outside forces.
One would have thought the United States would have learned something from Vietnam and used those lessons as a guidepost first in deciding to send U.S. and NATO troops into Afghanistan, and once decided would have set strict limits on how long we would be there and clear realizable objectives that would let us leave when the job was done, preferably in a few weeks and at most a few months. Twenty years is evidence of blurry goals (or no goals at all) and a failure to learn any lessons from the past.
In the Pentagon it is often said that the building has a historical memory of no more than five minutes. Maybe so, but the real culprit is that the United States did not want to understand why it failed in Vietnam and therefore never was able to formulate policy for future decision-makers.
While the Afghanistan debate will go on for years to come, it would be better to try and draw some lessons. When the United States walks away a loser, it harms the lives of freedom loving and freedom-seeking people around the world. We can avoid such mistakes only if we learn the lessons and teach them to our future leaders.
