# Lessons learned from the U.S. experience in Afghanistan



## longknife (May 31, 2018)

I was expecting a lot of gobbledygook out of this and was surprised to discover the following:

_Unfortunately, SIGAR’s overall assessment is that despite some heroic efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2017, the program mostly failed. This happened for a number of reasons, including the establishment of a set of unrealistic expectations about what could be achieved in just a few years’ time. The lack of capacity of U.S. government agencies to fully support those accelerated efforts, and institutional rivalries and bureaucratic hurdles compounded an already difficult task._

_Every organization and agency that worked on stabilization in Afghanistan—from Department of Defense (DOD) civil affairs and special operations forces to State and USAID—suffered from personnel and programming deficits borne from rapid scaling, short tours, and the pressure to make quick progress. No organization was prepared for these challenges—and it showed._

*In other words, billions spent for NOTHING!*

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## gipper (May 31, 2018)

A total waste like all wars.  

After the disaster that was Vietnam, the nation knew war was just another way the elites control us and profit from it.  Somewhere along the way, we lost that knowledge.


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## LuckyDuck (Jun 29, 2018)

2,300 American lives lost in that region.  A waste of good people.  Because of a combination of assorted tribal affiliations, weather and terrain, that country has never been conquered and never will.  The US needs to just pull out, it will eventually go back to being run by the Taliban anyway.


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