War of attrition does not mean casualty numbers, it means the goal of the war is to wear down the enemy so that their will to fight collapses which both the Taliban and the US tried to do, see: https://www.csis.org/analysis/afghan-war-attrition-peace-tal...
War of attrition almost certainly requires high continual casualty numbers, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article:
> Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and materiel.
Once Napoleon's army arrived in Moscow, there was a "what now" aspect to the war. They'd accomplished the goal that was set out and defeated Russia, but they didn't actually want to live in Moscow. So, they eventually left to go fight the Russian army, which had seemingly and unbelievably abandoned its crown city to the invaders. But they hadn't. Because Moscow was home, whether it was filled with these unseemly visitors or not. There was no way Napoleon's forces could win unless the Russians actually decided to sign a piece of paper and let them.
The US by contrast has enough territory already, they don't want or need Afghan soil. Instead they went to war so that Afghanistan would have their chosen government. The only way to do that is to colonize it and exert direct control. They never committed to that (it's kind of frowned upon internationally), so it was a failure.
But I do believe that the American people's heart were not into the fight, especially when it became a "forgotten" war. If we commit our full effort and our mind, we might have won the way we would stomach.
In the end, if this is not the kind of war the American people are willing to fight, then we shouldn't entered them.
This was a largely failing effort even years ago, considering that most of the afghan army were made up of people from the north of Afghanistan and previous geopolitics (north/south) play a role. The people in the south would at times trust the taliban over sympathisers for the previous northern warlords which had influence over members of the afghan army.
See this documentary (from 8 years ago) about how utterly lost and helpless this situation has always been: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI
He said that Taliban were dangerous religious fanatics, but at least they were predictable fanatics - they had a set of laws, some very harsh, that you had to follow, or else. On the other hand, the Northern Alliance forces, in his telling, were basically just looters - they didn't bring better laws so much so as no laws, just a free-for-all where the guy with the gun takes whatever he wants. So his solution to that dilemma was to emigrate, but he told me that if he couldn't do that, he'd prefer Taliban.
And we've done just that.
We're just not willing to admit that at the 11th hour we threw up our hands, said fuck it and decided that army would be the Taliban.
We literally handed them a country and all the shit they need to not be somebody's puppet.
If we had accepted that we'd just be turning over the country to the same old bunch of hard line jerks 10yr ago we could have better prepped for this moment but leaving the place on unstable footing is simply the price of deluding ourselves. I hope for everyone's sake it doesn't turn into a war torn shithole again.
If we do not know our goals, and not willing to spend blood and treasure, then what are we doing there?
In a land were so many self-appointed technocrats clamor for censorship, soon discussion of the real hefty topics at play will become badspeak and premptively banned, removed, silenced.
For example,have fun trying to say one thing about how Israel and Suadi Arabia both had more involvement in 9/11 than Afghanistan did without immediatedly being attacked.
Its easier to talk about 3-letter motivations like continued drug, gun money going into black book coffers so they dont have to account to congress only because its something more in the mainstream mind.
Another topic thats generally forbidden? Analysis of the media machine that pushed us into war(s) in the first place.
I could go on. The point is the real goals are not the presented goals. If you understand that you have a much better chance at real insight.
If the US had spent the last 20 years building infrastructure, railroads, highways, mining operations, schools to train engineers, managers, and professionals, Afghanistan would likely look a lot different.
But the US missed even low hanging fruit like making poppies a legitimate crop by giving Afghanistan a cut of the legal opioid market.
Without railroads and highways, Afghanistan will never move forward. It should have been the first thing we did, and not only to link up cities, but to locations with large amounts of natural resources to build up some wealth and industry.
Such high illiteracy rates will make it impossible to build enough of management and general bureaucracy needed to build anything large. It will make it hard to train workers in technology. You won't build railroads nor roads, you won't mainten them either.
Primitive mines are not competitive. They are not producing enough to feed you. And hungry people won't save money for school. You need technology.
20 years? Zahir Shah tried this for 40 years. Amanullah Khan also tried, as did several others. Numerous would-be reformers have thought as you do and tried to impose change on Afghanistan, and all their efforts have culminated in the situation we have now. It's been approached from a number of ideological/political directions. Some were monarchs, others proponents of republics. The PDPA/Soviets tried it from a Marxist/Leninist angle with lots of bloodshed, while Zahir Shah tried to create a constitutional monarchy and refrained from murdering his political opponents. Neither succeeded in the end.
What would you bring to the table that hasn't been tried before?
The war in Afghanistan was started badly, continued thoughtlessly, and, naturally, ended poorly. As it was originally destined to do.
You are suggesting that it is the US's gentlemanly morals that puts it at such a disadvantage as to make "winning" impossible. But what is "winning" absent those values? More dead Taliban at the cost of more dead civilians? If that is "winning" for the US, it is almost certainly not "winning" for the Afghans who live in the country and would prefer to be alive.
But say you kill more Taliban while generally tolerating civilian casualties, then what? The US is no longer a force protecting Afghans from the Taliban, but a force bent on conquering the land of Afghanistan. The Taliban will increasingly look like liberators against a bloodthirsty invader whose raison d'etre for occupying the country is not the livelihood of Afghans but to install a puppet government. The Taliban will regrow, resupplied by the friends and family of civilian dead, and emboldened with a moral mandate.
The more you "win", the more enemies you create for tomorrow. At the strategic level, there is no winning, only various ways to lose more slowly. But eventually the outcome is the same, as it has been in all Western colonies. The difference is that in the old days, the goal was just to extract wealth from a place, not to reconstitute its population (though the French did try).
It also contains his "Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia" which was essentially the US Marines portion of the Navy's plans for WWII in the Pacific.
The PDPA and Soviets tried this, and it didn't work. Together they killed tens of thousands of combatants and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians. Millions more were displaced. And what did they get for that bloodshed? Certainly not the reform they sought.
You may as well try to crush a fistful of water.