The article is mostly political, so I'll just leave the link and the warning: politics. However, there are some interesting parts that I'll quote here:
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Gen. Petraeus swore he would have the Taliban bleeding from the nose and ready to sign whatever he demanded of them by July 2011. That never happened. McChrystal abandoned COIN after its very first test case in the town of Marjah in the Helmand Province.
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By the time Petraeus got there, he’d forgotten all about his own counterinsurgency doctrine and simply escalated special operations night raids and air strikes instead. As the great Gareth Porter proved, they were mostly killing and imprisoning innocent people. The Drone Papers leaked by Daniel Hale further confirmed Porter’s reporting.
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The Taliban figured out very quickly that if the U.S. strategy was centered on training up the Afghan National Army, they could thwart that by sending in sleeper agents to commit “insider” or “green on blue” attacks against their American trainers. That was it. The game was over. The distance created between the U.S. soldiers and the local charges by these attacks amounted to the ultimate sabotage of their plans to create an effective force—if that were ever possible.
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The ANA was mostly a bunch of “ghost soldiers,” who existed only on paper for the financial gain of the officers in charge. The actual men who showed up were mostly looking for a pair of boots, a rifle and a decent meal. At no time did the largely Tajik and Uzbek army have the Taliban’s sense of morale in fighting for their country. They were fighting at the behest of a foreign power to try to subjugate the population of part of their country, not really in self-defense at all.
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https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2...ghan-disaster/