I don't particularly like having the genesis of this thread attributed to me. I simply made the following observation in a thread that proposed that we had "lost two wars":

It's just time to recognize that we don't need to control, directly or indirectly through the Northern Alliance, Afghanistan to prevent it from being an AQ sanctuary. To recognize that the Northern Alliance has absolutely no interest or desire to be the government we want them to be. To recognize that we are better off simply packing up and going home than we are executing any kind of phased out exit plan
Certainly there was a "war" phase to both Afghanistan and Iraq, but they were short, and largely one-sided. A UW war in Afghanistan where we shifted the balance of power to leverage the Northern Alliance into power. Not because we believed in the Northern Alliance, but rather because we wanted to punish the Taliban for providing sanctuary to AQ and not turning them over to us upon our demand. Then a conventional war in Iraq to defeat the government and military of that country.

It is what we convinced ourselves we needed to do after those short wars that has caused us problems. The reasons for this are myriad and disputed. For any smart answer someone else thinks they have a smarter one. Fine. We should at least agree that we really don't understand these things very well, and are so in love with our own narrative we can never grasp that others would simply reject solutions to their problems that we offer, particularly when both the problem and the solution are defined by us to suit our interests and perspectives.

In many ways there is a tremendous resistance to such meddling by the US in many places. Our intentions are largely moot to the populaces they affect, particularly when they are reasonably working to get their own governments to evolve to meet their evolving expectations of governance. We don't know if we should provide CT and BPC support to keep the old regime in power, or UW support to help some popular movement prevail. So we do a bit of both without much rhyme nor reason to our approaches. We go where the Intel guys tell us to, which means AQ leads us about by the nose as they leverage our fears of what a changing world means to US influence and power.

This was never about Afghanistan. It was never about Iraq. Even AQ is as much a symptom as a problem. It is time to stop agonizing over specific places or organizations or individuals and begin thinking about who we are and how we best define and secure our interests in the changing world emerging around us.

Debates over who "won" or who "lost"; or excessive hand-wringing over a particular place such as Afghanistan where we happened to act out on these fears is not that helpful.