Quote Originally Posted by Bob's World View Post
1. The form of legitimacy necessery for natural stability cannot be created or bestowed by foreign power, but rather must be bestowed by culturally accepted ways across the populace.
I think this lesson is conditional and unique to specific circumstances. What is "natural stability"? History is replete with examples of military occupations imposing culturally unacceptable systems of power without any kind of legitimacy (legal, political, cultural, or other); some episodes with less conflict than others. The Soviet Union managed to do so in a dozen countries at the end of World War II with limited resistance - why did partisans fight the Nazis but not the Soviets? Why are there no partisans in North Korea? I doubt it has to do with legitimacy. Ultimately, power (re: coercion), not legitimacy, determines outcomes in environments with little or not political constraints. The problem we have in Afghanistan is not that the US, West, or Karzai administration is illegitimate but that their opponents have the power to resist (that in turn fuels perceptions of illegtimacy). The basic power of the state is its monopoly on violence, which obviously is in serious contention by vying political factions. So we have run into the basic problem that we have neither destroyed the enemy's will or capabilities, while watching our own will erode, and thus the basis of state legitimacy - the monopoly on violence - remains in contention.

Legitimacy as you seem to articulate it is relevant in framed political environments in which cultural and legal norms establish acceptable ends, ways, and means for action. This is where the political object constrains the military act (i.e. rules of engagement), even if not always perfectly rational, it in some way seeks to mitigate the problems you cite with legitimacy. But at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is mission achievement (addressed later in this post); how missions are selected, executed, and relate to one another and broader policy is another issue altogether.

2. To maximize foreign influence one must first minimize foreign control.
I don't think this is a lesson that can be extracted from the experience of Afghanistan -- at least not to the extent that it can be used as a hard and fast rule for future conflicts. In one sense you are correct -- committing to one course of action, in this case military intervention comes at the cost of all the other actions that could have been taken at that moment. Is influence any more desirable than control? Since ultimately we are more concerned with the ends than the means then the answer is "it depends". For Afghanistan specifically, I would argue that mission achievement cannot be attained without foreign control; the central Afghan government is virtually powerless without either support from abroad or from the regional political factions of the country. This is probably the central lesson about Afghanistan specifically. And if our interest is in imposing globalized political norms and reducing freedom of action of terrorist organization, then we must to some degree do it ourselves.

3. Winning is not preserving some government in power or destroying some threat to the same. Winning is when the % of the population who perceive themselves as stakeholders in the solution of governance grows.
"Winning" is achieving our established objectives, however defined. But this occurs on multiple levels - the selection of poor tactical objectives can lead to tactical victories and operational failures, and so on up the chain to the national level. At the end of the day, when it comes down to measuring competing interests, everyone else and everything else is expendable.