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Pretty much spot on; the only way for Afghanistan to have succeeded as a democracy would have required multiple generations of occupation, in order to permanently impact the culture through ideological immersion.

Only once the pre-occupation population dies out (or at least severely diminished due to old age) - and are replaced by successive generations that grew up in that environment - would it become self-sustaining.

It’s very easy to dismiss the Afghan people have “always been like that” - all the while forgetting that the current religious ferver is mostly due to a power vacuum following the failed Soviet invasion of the late ‘80s.

Prior to that, the metropolitan areas weren’t all that different to pre-revolution Iran.

Oh, absolutely. My point is more that the US shouldn't have been there to begin with, just like the US shouldn't be bombing Iranian children now.

So they won the battle but lost the war?

That is correct, and don't let anybody tell you you are wrong.

He might want to do that but it's not very likely to succeed; the U. S. doesn't suspend elections during wartime. They didn't during their own civil war: no way a foreign war would have any precedent or sway anyone.

Tbh I disagree. Domestic unrest won't come from the immense horror of starving millions of people into submission. We've been doing that for decades and it has never been a significant issue. It will come from the frustration of feeling the detoriation of our quality of life while we all watch hundreds of billions be spent on a war that doesn't benefit the public at all.

I wish I thought Americans would act out of moral concern but palestine alone has shown this to be untrue.

World citizens don't bat an eyelash at US/Israel starving Palestinians, Cubans, Free Korea, Somalia, or anywhere else they please.

I have been told repeatedly that the mountainous country overlooks the strait with lots of places to hide small rockets and people to fire those rockets.

That isn't quite accurate. The US military is very good at killing people and destroying things. To win you need a strategy that goes beyond those things. It involves aspects outside the military. You need diplomats to coordinate and negotiate with allies, diplomats to meet and negotiate with the opposition in conflicts where that is feasible, a strategy that has end goals and a reasonable way to get to those goals, political entities to explain to the US citizenry and the world at large why the conflict is necessary, and a bunch more. The military doesn't really do most of that, and the US hasn't bothered with having any of those things for a long time. The problem is the US government keeps just saying to 'conquer' some country and giving no real sense of what that even means.

It's an attempt to distract from the Epstein files.

America took parts of it and camped out in the cities for 20 years. The rest of it ebbed and flowed depending on the date.