ANSF performance 2015 onwards

[omarali50]

"A power that creates and protects a government in some foreign place, cannot create a security force to effectively secure that de facto illegitimate government against some challenger who's forces perceive their cause as legitimate."

This is too broad a generalization. It depends on the power, the force they create and the enemy they face.
In this case, failure was not guaranteed. But of course, it COULD fail.
The tragedy is that it could have worked.

[Bob's World]

Broad indeed. But not too broad.

Please give me an example of where this has worked?

[Bill Moore]

"A power that creates and protects a government in some foreign place, cannot create a security force to effectively secure that de facto illegitimate government against some challenger who's forces perceive their cause as legitimate."

This is too broad a generalization. It depends on the power, the force they create and the enemy they face.
In this case, failure was not guaranteed. But of course, it COULD fail.
The tragedy is that it could have worked.

I'm with you on this and it takes us back to the wise saying that, "all models are wrong, but still useful." If someone becomes overly enamored with their model, it no longer serves its heuristic role. Clearly the USSR created a number of governments where its security forces held the line for decades. One could argue we did the same in Germany and Japan. In Vietnam, the government did hold against the insurgency, they couldn't hold against the superior conventional power of North Vietnam, and no this wasn't Phase 3 of Mao's insurgency model. You can also argue that the UK and France created a number of states and trained their security forces that have held the line.

If you're going to argue that they failed 50 to 100 years later, that is getting a bit petty and unrealistic. New issues emerge, history doesn't freeze in place.

If you look at the Arab Spring, any state that kept control of their security forces defeated the uprising, with the exception of Syria. Assad's government in Syria, to the surprise of many who embrace liberal social models, still exists.

Clearly these issues are much more complex than any simplistic model can explain. We need to use multiple modes as lens to try to understand, but also free ourselves from models to take a fresh look at the issue as it really is, without the bias of a model or ideology.