New Developments (Maybe) in Afghanistan

Some interesting news coming out of Afghanistan. It looks like US troops are pulling back from the countryside and focusing on the cities. Additionally, the mission seems to be shifting to a defensive one: pulling security and protecting the troops vs clearing/holding territory and expanding outward. Meanwhile, our government has reportedly negotiated directly with the Taliban in Qatar.
I'm no Clausewitz, but it looks to me like the US is starting to wind down, and may be in the early stages of withdrawing from Afghanistan.
I'm not a fan of leaving the Afghan government out of the negotiations. It's their country, after all. But somehow, I think it'll be okay. I'm betting that a lot of Afghan gov't officials and military personnel will strike deals with the Taliban the day after we leave. Hell, I bet a lot of them are closet members of the Taliban, or some other militia, already.
Or maybe I'm just telling myself that to rationalize the US leaving a weak & fragile frenemy government in the lurch.
I'm not a fan of cutting the Afghan government out of the negotiations. Some of them genuinely put their faith in us, have worked with us toward building a stable & safe Afghanistan, and a few have even fought, bled, and died to make that vision a reality. Excluding them is a slap in the face, and is a cowardly move.
However, so is leaving. Don't get me wrong, I am fully aware of that. But here's the thing. The way we were going, we are not any closer to success now than we were in 2002. We have troops controlling every piece of the country, from one end to the other. We have the most technologically-advanced military on the planet, with some of the most fearsome weaponry invented. But none of that matters, because Afghanistan is about as unconquerable as it gets. The last person who came close was Alexander the Great. Just about every nation since then has eventually been chased out in defeat.

The US will likely be no different. No matter if we stay another year, another five years, or another fifty years. Now, maybe if we had gone about it differently - maybe if we had established an overwhelming humanitarian presence in 2001/02, instead of letting combat ops largely drive the mission - we could have succeeded. Maybe if we had brought in State and USAID, had invested billions in rebuilding the country's infrastructure, had put locals to work demining, planting crops, building roads, a power grid, water treatment facilities, and schools. Maybe that would have transformed Afghanistan into a success story. 
Maybe.
But that's a lot of water under the bridge, and we'll never know how it turned out. 2001/02 was arguably our one shot at that, because with everything that happened afterward - Iraq, the financial crisis, the ACA - we never had the money or manpower or political will to try again.
And some seventeen years later, it's long past time to cut our losses. All the money we've spent on Afghanistan, in one form or another, might as well have been put in a pile and set on fire, for all the return on investment that the US got. To say nothing of the thousands of dead and crippled Americans and Afghans the war has produced. 
I would hate it if Afghanistan became another example of blowback - if our ostensible allies today become our enemies in a decade or two. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened, not even the first time in Afghanistan. 
So while I am really, really dismayed and disgusted that we're leaving the Afghan government twisting in the wind, I support the decision to wind things down and leave - if that indeed turns out to be the case.

PS: Before someone asks, I realize that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, if it happens, will likely be on Trump's watch. Meaning that I have to give him credit for something. I'm okay with that. Now, it remains to be seen whether he screws it up somehow, like he has just about everything else. It's also worth asking whether he's doing this on Russia's behalf, for some reason we're not yet aware of. (Paranoid? Sure. But given his past actions, it's a question worth raising.) But ultimately, I agree with what he's doing here. It doesn't even come close to cancelling out all the disastrous decisions he's made, but it is a pretty big item on the plus side of the ledger.

Lessons (not) learned from Vietnam

The recent PBS series on the Vietnam War and the recent debate over the national anthem got me thinking about the parallels between then and now, and I'm putting my thoughts into this stream-of-consciousness post about how little has changed since the end of the war.  Specifically, how little we (as a country) have learned since then.  Let's look at the lessons we thought we learned, but then discarded.

First, the US government (the White House and the Pentagon) fell back into the habit of sending troops to fight wars for flimsy justifications, vaguely-defined objectives, and inadequate equipment and resources.  This hasn't happened all the time, but more often than not, the troops went in without what they needed for victory: a coherent plan, resources that matched the objective, and a valid reason to fight.  When it comes to smaller, shorter conflicts, the score is about even.  Grenada and Panama didn't become quagmires, but Somalia and Lebanon did.  In regard to large-scale conflicts, the tally is pretty one-sided.  The 1990-91 Gulf War had a clear mission and sufficient resources, if a rationale that was more about economics than security; but on the other side of the ledger, we have Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Iraq Part II.

There was supposed to be a deep discussion about America's use of military power in the wake of Vietnam, but it never really got off the ground.  Not enough to lead to any meaningful changes, anyway.  The senior officers who hoped to avoid a repeat of the Vietnam quagmire succeeded for a few years, and during that time they managed to implement meaningful reforms.  For example, when Colin Powell served in the White House as a military assistant to Secretary Weinberger, he helped craft the "Weinberger Doctrine", which acted as a litmus test for when to commit US troops.  The war hawks eventually outmaneuvered those senior officers, though, and critics who charged that the Doctrine was so narrow that it practically guaranteed US troops would never be deployed anywhere.  Vaguely-defined missions began to come back into favor in the 1990s, and became standard procedure after 9/11.

Washington also ably deflected any deep discussion by transitioning from a draftee military to an all-volunteer force.  Richard Nixon wisely calculated that halting the draft would deflate anti-war protests, and he was right.  Once the overall population stopped having a stake in America's wars, they stopped worrying that they might someday get dragged into a quagmire conflict.  This weakened the bond between the military and the general population, and gave military leadership much more license to send the military anywhere they wanted.  Somewhere along the way, Congress (which holds the power to declare war) stopped holding the president accountable in any meaningful way.  How it got there is a story about a lot of boring political maneuvering, but the moral of the story is that "accountability" was a sham.  Political appointees and mid-level staffers took the fall for military failures, partisan bickering replaced debate, and nobody asked the questions that should have been asked after Vietnam.  Which brings us to the present, where history is repeating itself.

I'm almost done here, but I'd like to make one more point.  To me, this isn't an academic debate.  I served in the Army for four years and spent five years after that as a defense contractor.  During that time, I made several trips to combat zones and deployed locations.  My experiences have made me very skeptical of how the government employs the military, to the point where I oppose a military intervention by default unless I see a very good reason for it.  I'm probably not evaluating a military intervention impartially, but I don't really care if I'm being fair or not.  I think being extremely skeptical is preferable to not being skeptical enough.  Every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine is someone's child/parent/sibling/friend, and if the president and the senior generals put them in harm's way, they need to be absolutely certain that the sacrifice is worth it.  Anything less is morally repugnant in my opinion.