has much materiality to this thread - Finding Petraeusism in Naglandia (heavily annotated with 58 footnotes); and subtitled "The U.S. Military’s Hyper-American “Can-do” Spirit and Utopian Ideals Found in Afghanistan". The subtitle pins too much blame on the military. It could be reduced to "The Hyper-American “Can-do” Spirit and Utopian Ideals Found in Afghanistan".

The author's (Anon's) BLUF:

We can’t turn Afghanistan into a progressive European-like society. We shouldn’t build an exact replica of our own Army for them, and we shouldn’t attempt to establish a Western-style police force. We definitely don’t need to be fighting their insurgents for them. Let’s train some of their army and police as the local conditions merit for a few years, and that’s all. We can concentrate the rest of our power in that region towards Pakistan, knowing that we’ll have to play a little dirty, build up our intelligence capabilities and grow some more diplomats. And we can still be “population-centric”, but let us redefine that to mean that we understand the people better, not that we are attempting to protect them from something they might not wish to be protected from even if some of them sometimes say they want to be. Surely we must be as unconventionally savvy in our thinking and dealings with people in an unconventional environment as we talk about needing to be in a tactical manner. In other words, instead of trying to get everyone to enjoy cookies and milk while watching Leave it to Beaver, let’s play some poker.
Regards

Mike