Entropy:

A mouthful.

I find it funny that the MG Flynn Intelligence gap was, perhaps, a gap between what was informing and driving military actions on the ground, as opposed to one of general understanding elsewhere.

There is no shortage of better wisdom all over the US, from Open Source to non, but it did not seem to survive translation into rational and consistent application.

I enjoyed Bob's latest mind warp: Let's go down to Kabul and....Karzai....regulated patronage.... Helps to understand the gap.

When I indicated that Crocker has a good grasp of the neighbors, that hardly meant that he was, or could, just go over there and fix them, as Bob suggested. Rather, it meant a realistic understanding of the complex challenges and linkages to all---most of which we could never really understand to their indigenous and competing satisfactions anyway.

At best, you discuss, you find common ground where you can, you diffuse the immediate bombs once triggered. It is a whack-a-mole task at best, and little of it is best done in a public spotlight.

It is from the complex understanding, however, that we can then understand our situation, and where/what comes next for us----a potentially very different problem set than what comes next for THEM.

Fact is that we are too often viewing these systems from a warped perspective of immediate post-conflict survivors, fueled by massive economic distortions/dislocations (some of our own doing).

The damage and fragmentation, however, is hardly the result of just us after 2002. The story goes before (and will continue after us). In reality, the door to Afghanistan's own destruction began when it broke politically between the new wave and the old traditional societies. That followed with various factions taking sides and bringing in outside influence to support their side. Pandora's Box was opened by Afghans, not us.

The big problem I have in these conflict zones with too-long US involvement is where our critics forget, after a decade or so, that it was pretty bad before we came, and the door to our coming was always opened from the inside.

Iraq, once credibly aspiring in the 1970s to be a jewel, was consumed by a brutal and self-inflicted war pattern resulting from attacks on its neighbors (Iran, then Kuwait). It's economic, physical and social infrastructure was destroyed then, not by us. The Anfal, draining the marshes, and mass graves pre-date us.

Same patterns in Afghanistan. The Taliban turning brutal, oppressive, and threatening to its neighbors and the world is what, in large part, drove a situation where someone had to go in and put a stop to it.

Obviously, our actions afterwards are a debate. But it is one intrinsically wrapped up in the delusional "Failed State" policies floating around Washington----lets just create a series of protectorates which we can manage through proxies (while outwardly asserting their independence and self-governance).

Just so much Lawrence/Bell delusions of grandure.

What to do next with these countries is something, however brutal and frustrating, which must come from within (even if that initially means returning to the initial Pandora's Box and the underlying and still unresolved internal and neighbor problems.

Remember that it was Crocker who was sitting at the table with Afghanistan's neighbors (Pakistan, India and IRAN) to resolve the What Comes Next problem when the talks blew up after the Axis of Evil speech.

The US, now, is probably not the right player to put that Genie back in the Bottle---so it falls back to the neighbors and Afghanistan. Bad choices (one at the expense of another) will create reactions, and re-iterations). It is a process we stopped but needs to get back on track. The answers will not be ours.

As you rightly point out, intelligence was not the gap, and gloom is nothing new. Intelligence informing the ground actions (the MG Flynn problem) is, and remains the gap: Let's go up to Kabul and straighten things out...Let's get those Pakistanis in line...Let's have Karzai arrange a Loya Jirga...