So I served in the Marines from 2005-2010 and I worked in intelligence from 2010-2013. I speak Pashto and Arabic as well and would argue that people have built up the cultural and religious bugaboos to excess. We still could win, but the problem fundamentally is a lack of political will here to accept the costs of making war.

Those costs being:

1. Time - rotating green units in every 9-12 months and veteran units out is a recipe for failure. They have to relearn everything and rebuild any trust you build up with local leaders. The closest we got to that was 2 year deployments of reservists, which was effective in Iraq.

2. Casualties - holing up in a FOB for fear of KIAs does not help the locals. Another example is Bergdahl. We spent countless hours and millions of dollars looking for a single MIA private. Everything else went on the backburner for months and it did cost lives, but it served as PR that we were doing something to recover one screw-up in a war involving millions.

3. Governance vs Headhunting - Drones are great at cheap effective kinetic action, but worthless in police functions. We emphasize drones along with low-quantity troop deployments, because murderbot losses do not matter and SF casualties are bucketed as volunteers. I could go further into the detriments of cannibalizing your best soldiers from line units, but that's a whole other issue. To stabilize a country like Afghanistan you need to get violence down to zero long enough for a generation to know what peace looks like. To do that you need to prove that you are there to govern, that means deploying troops/police in massive numbers and a court system that works. We spent too much time seeking out werewolves to shoot silver bullets at, playing whack-a-mole.

There is an intense focus by politicians on casualty numbers. We've been doing it on the cheap, but cheap adds up if you don't win and the wars go on for decades. I don't see that changing unfortunately.