I too agree with much of what Bill and Dayuhan have provided in response to this question.

Do the Philippines and Colombia have decades, or more, to go to get to a system of governance that fosters natural stability across their respective populaces? Absolutely.


Can the US somehow "fix" their problems for them, or "defeat" the threats to the current system? No.

But arguably the Iraq and Afghanistan the US first intervened in were no worse overall, and in some regards better, than the Colombia and Philippines we were invited to assist.
Certainly the nature of the US response and resultant situations very much are "apples and truck tires."

But is that primarily due to the differences in the situations or the differences in our approaches???\

I will not name and cannot count the number of senior US officials who lobbied mightily to convert an OEF-Philippines "apple" into an OEF-Afghanistan "truck tire."

I also agree that limiting ones objectives is crucial to ones ability to attaining the same (and in not creating a strategic disaster on accident by not understanding the very predictable 2nd and 3rd order effects of our actions).

In many ways I think the strategic failure of Vietnam; and the looming strategic failures of Iraq and Afghanistan (the book is not closed on either, they could, with mighty course changes somehow avoid that fate), was not due to the "unwinnable" nature of the problems, but rather due to the unwinnable nature of our intervention and scope of our objectives. They unwinnable by design, not by nature.

There are many now who clamor in the name of Transnational Organized Crime to turn US design for Mexico and Latin America writ large into a "truck tire." They rely heavily on the lessons learned in, and the capacity built for Iraq and Afghanistan to validate their arguments for bring that same kind of "success" to the problem sets there that we applied to problem sets in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I predict the same outcome. Brilliant tactical effectiveness; Trillions of dollars spent; localized and temporary zones of suppressed "threat" activity; maximum scores across all of our very tactical and objective metrics we design to measure our success; - and a strategic mess worse that what we found left in our wake.

For me the #1 planning criteria has to be absolute and uncompromising respect for the host nation's sovereignty and legitimacy. Not as we legally define it. Not as we perceive it. But as the host nation legally defines it and as their diverse populaces perceive it.

#2 is narrowly limiting our objectives within the context of those left and right limits drawn for us by the host.

#3 (but done first) is to ask first what it is we can change about ourselves to mitigate the problem that is compelling us to believe we must intervene to help change some other. Often this only requires a change of the tactics of our foreign policy rather than a change of the goals of our foreign policy. A simple updating for the world we actually live in today, rather the world we lived in when said approaches were first designed. For the CTOC issue it demands a hard assessment of domestic policies designed by and for ourselves, but with major negative impacts on others (that are creating effects growing to a scope that now begins to threaten us).

We have a Powell Doctrine that lays out good considerations prior to committing to war; we probably need a similar doctrine of considerations prior to committing to any type of foreign manipulation/intervention in general. One that takes into account the realities of the relative shift of power between governments and populations created by modern information technologies.