In the midst of a very long FP article 'The Inside Story of How the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan' by vali Nasr, are a few gems:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...stan?page=full

IN OCTOBER 2010, during a visit to the White House, General Kayani gave Obama a 13-page white paper he had written to explain his views on the outstanding strategic issues between Pakistan and the United States. Kayani 3.0, as the paper was dubbed (it was the third one Pakistanis had given the White House on the subject), could be summarized as: You are not going to win the war, and you are not going to transform Afghanistan. This place has devoured empires before you; it will defy you as well. Stop your grandiose plans, and let's get practical, sit down, and discuss how you will leave and what is an end state we can both live with.

(Then). Kayani's counsel was that if you want to leave, just leave -- we didn't believe you were going to stay anyway -- but don't do any more damage on your way out. This seemed to be a ubiquitous sentiment across the region. No one bought our argument for sending more troops into Afghanistan, and no one was buying our arguments for leaving.
He ends with:
They know the truth: America is leaving Afghanistan to its own fate. America is leaving even as the demons of regional chaos that first beckoned it there are once again rising to threaten its security.

America has not won this war on the battlefield, nor has the country ended it at the negotiating table. America is just washing its hands of this war. We may hope that the Afghan army the United States is building will hold out longer than the one that the Soviet Union built, but even that may not come to pass. Very likely, the Taliban will win Afghanistan again, and this long, costly war will have been for naught.