Strategy begins with empathy: Netflix series "Colony"

[Azor]

As to Vietnam, the whole construct of "North" and "South" states was a fiction created by the US…

Not at all. Firstly, Vietnam was unified in the medieval and early modern period from north to south, with the south being consolidated over 800 years after northern Vietnam had gained independence from China. Secondly, Vietnam was divided into three French protectorates for almost a century. There were regional differences between north and south prior to American intervention, including greater Westernisation and use of the French language in the south.

It was a 30 year resistance against foreign occupation and revolution against the "legal" but illegitimate governments and entities created and protected by those occupiers. Insurgency ebbs and flows, and this was an independence movement from start to finish. Our meddling merely delayed the inevitable and brought an extra generation of hardship to the people of that region.

That is the popular conception of the conflict in Vietnam. Assuming that is true, why then did the North Vietnamese place themselves in a position of dependency upon Soviet and Chinese support in order to conquer the South? Why did they invite hundreds of thousands of foreign soldiers and advisors into their country, when the Americans had not invaded the North? Why risk being at the mercy of a great power that had occupied Vietnam before for a millennium?

The NLF was dependent upon the NVA and the NVA was dependent upon the Soviets and Chinese. This is not to say that the South would have faced no insurgency, but there is a major difference between 1st Chechnya and the Chechen insurgency from 2009 on. Even with massive Soviet and Chinese support, the NLF and NVA were smashed time and time again, but were far from the “golden third” irrecoverable loss rate necessary for winning a war of attrition.

Was de-Ba'athification a tactical error? Yes. All Iraq needed was a punitive expedition at most. But instead we removed the government, stayed, and put in and sought to protect one of our liking. Strategically that creates presumptive resistance warfare against the occupier, and presumptive revolutionary illegal democracy against the puppet regime. Better tactics would not have prevented the inevitable strategic results of our actions.

The complete removal of the Iraqi government was both an arrogant attempt to create a client state and a concession to those Americans who would have bemoaned it had the US not reconstructed the country; and why not as a “model” Arab Muslim democracy?

De-Ba’athification was a decisive strategic error, because a provisional government led by Ba’athists could have governed the country as the Coalition worked to bring the Kurds and Shias into the political process.

As to Afghanistan?…As a patronage society where there is "winner" or "loser" and little in between, there is always competition to be the winner. Those who had patronage power under the Taliban will always (rightfully) believe that " but for" the meddling of the US they would still be in power - so there will always be revolutionary illegal democracy against the government we created and protect; and always resistance warfare against our presence to do so.

Well, the Taliban failed to take responsibility for hosting Al Qaeda. Yes, there are winners and losers, but should we be compassionate toward those Germans and Japanese who benefited from their countries’ wars of aggression and mass murder?

The Taliban is far from a “revolutionary illegal democracy”. It is a Pakistani construction designed to divert the Pashtun people’s collective energies from ethnic nationalism to Muslim supremacism. Pakistan is an unwieldly mash of several ethnic groups and Islamabad suppresses those centrifugal forces through Islamism and conflict with India. The Pashtun nation straddles the Durand Line, making southern Afghanistan ungovernable unless Pakistan is carved up.

…so I sadly love the irony of the fact that we view the conflict through the lens of our own fantasy… We love to call things "failed" that don't look like what we think right is… This is human nature, and we are not exempt because we rationalize good intentions, and believe ourselves to be "exceptional."

It sounds as though you are disillusioned. Yet what of the reconstruction of Western Europe, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan? Failures can’t be dwelled upon in isolation…