Great post. I’ll just quibble with one word. It took 20 years to re-learn what most of our ancestors knew well. It isn’t enough to occupy a country. If you want to replace an ancient tribal culture, you have to remove that culture’s elites, colonize and farm the land with your own citizens more or less permanently, put down any resistance violently, and then support the colony until it finally assimilates the existing population or is assimilated by it. All of the ancient empires did that when they could, Europe did it during the age of colonization where feasible. The Arabs did it during the Islamic conquest. China has done it throughout their long history. Russia is the largest country on Earth because it colonized all of the indigenous cultures from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean during the conquest of Siberia. The Soviet Empire tried to do it to Eastern Europe too with their Russification programs, but weren’t able to stay long enough because the Soviet Empire was destroyed after only 45 years.

The US was never going to colonize Afghanistan. It was folly to believe that Afghanistan was going to adopt western values in a mere 20 years of occupation.