The Great Escape
Why failure is all but inevitable in Afghanistan:
1. The Taliban have a safe haven in Pakistan
2. Our Afghan allies are less motivated than our Afghan enemies, the Taliban having been the victors in the Afghan civil war of the 90s
3. The Taliban are indigenous forces with sources of fighters and funds that are not strained by the insurgency, whereas our military faces brutal logistical costs, worn out equipment, and too many combat tours per unit—as in Vietnam, they can readily outlast us
4. The Afghan government is corrupt and incompetent, supported only by those who directly benefit from its largesse (the parasites) or its neglect (the corrupt bullies)
5. After 8 years of occupation, the Afghan army has only 90,000 members, of whom only 50,000 are deemed by Western military leaders to be capable of operating autonomously (and even this capability is contingent upon Western logistical support)

Secondary reasons for failure:
6. Pakistan believes it has a strategic interest vis-à-vis India to maintain a reserve of committed Islamists in its frontier provinces and Afghanistan
7. The Taliban represent the Pashtun ethnicity against the Tajik-controlled government, making the conflict partly a civil war
8. The Taliban are funded through drug dealing and Islamic charities, two sources we cannot interdict, though we are squandering resources pursuing them
9. The primary form of schooling in most of Pashtunstan is the madrassa, a religious education that funnels an endless stream of fighters into the Taliban
10. There is no Afghan economy, making the Afghan government entirely dependent upon Western aid and prone to a dependency psychology of free-riding our efforts
11. The Taliban are using our presence to recruit, raise morale, secure funding—and have grown stronger year by year since their defeat in the 2001 invasion
12. Afghanistan’s GDP is $12 billion now, having more than doubled since the invasion, supported mainly be the three pillars of subsistence work, drug trafficking, and Western spending of various kinds: by contrast, the West spends $60 billion a year on its occupation (12 times the pre-invasion GDP, 5 times current GDP, 15 times average yearly aid to Afghanistan since the invasion, one third of Pakistan’s GDP, and 8 times Pakistan’s military spending—all of which ratios are disproportionate to the task, the goal, and the reward)
13. Afghanistan is far too primitive economically, educationally, culturally to function autonomously as a democracy—it can only be united in submission to a tyranny, a natural development that we have forbidden, inviting the continuing chaos of competing tribes and warlords
14. There has been very little attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan, little sense of long-term commitment or of a tangible stake in the nation’s future, the balance between resources devoted to military priorities completely disproportionate to those devoted to civilizing the populace by means of education and development
15. Afghanistan has a huge opium trade which, according to the UN, is worth $3.4 billion at export, 28% of GDP, resulting in government corruption, Taliban funding, and local resistance to eradication efforts since they would reduce local incomes


Why the war in Afghanistan is not in our strategic interest:
1. The West has no vital positive interests in Afghanistan, only the extremely weak negative one of preventing the land from being used as a safe haven for terrorists—but the case for this negative interest is supported by inconsistent reasoning since we do not have the will to control all such safe havens (eg, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Gaza, Iran, Saudi Arabia), and any of these places would provide adequate opportunity to rehearse another 9/11
2. Even the establishment of a self-sustaining government in Afghanistan would be insufficient to ensure that it will not become a terrorist safe-haven (see the list of countries above, which, except Somalia, have such governance in place): nation-building does not prevent terrorist incubation—Afghanistan itself was essentially a united nation when bin Laden hatched the 9/11 plot there
3. The Western presence in Afghanistan exacerbates instability in a much more important country: Pakistan

In sum, we probably cannot win in Afghanistan and, even if we could, there would be little point to it.