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I have to comment here because this is so absolutely mind numbingly wrong. The war was totally completely won, Afghanistan was completely pacified and the withdrawal was a political optics move planned by Trump and executed by Biden. There were literally 0 American casualties in Afghanistan in the year and a half leading up to the withdrawal and the coalition had control over any semi-urban or urban area in the country. No doubt the Taliban still existed, but that's about the worst you could say.
It was only won if America was the British Empire and could run a colonial police occupation for the next 80 years.
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The Taliban were deliberately not targeting American forces because of the upcoming withdrawal. There was no reason to risk the men or the possible retaliation.
Likewise, one could conclude that the US had decisively beaten North Vietnam - there were only 29 American deaths in 1973, and just 1 in 1974!
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It was a win in the sense of inflicting great damage on the enemy while suffering relatively little damage yourself.
It was a failure in terms of creating a self-sustaining and western aligned country. The Taliban quickly regained power, and the Kurds who had worked with the Americans as allies were left behind to fend for themselves.
I would not call that situation a straight up loss, but I can't justify calling it a victory either, since the occupation ultimately could not manage to fulfill its goals, and everything it gained vanished shortly after it left.
Kurds in Afghanistan?
You're probably thinking of the Kurds in Iraq, who are doing great by regional standards. The allies we left behind in Afghanistan were mostly Tajiks and to some extent Hazaras.
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There were casualties during that period, just not KIA casualties ... but that's a nitpick; I'd agree that KIA is the right metric here. I'd also say "literally 0" is even more impressive a result than necessary; by 2014 the US death rates in Afghanistan were ... still worse than in the city of St. Louis, but by a factor of around 4, not 40.
The trouble is that after we won the war (which we did, because we reduced troop levels from 100k to 10k and we were still fine), we had no idea how to win the peace (which we didn't, because we reduced troop levels from 10k to 0 and the archaic totalitarian theocracy took over again so fast it was like the previous decades hadn't happened). I'm not sure how or why we failed there. The qualifiers in your comment suggest that "3/4 of Afghani people don't live in semi-urban or urban areas" might have been a big part of the issue. I've heard the theory that our attempts to retain local alliances via extreme leniency toward "allies" (looking the other way about things like bacha bazi and drug production that the Taliban had tried to crack down on) backfired horribly in public sentiment. I could list a few others, but they're all just guesses; even when we were on the spot nobody knew what we were doing wrong or we'd just have not done that.
The short version is, "we tried to build their military, institutions, and infrastructure to be like what works for America, but without actually changing any of the foundational stuff locally to make what works for America work."
It's not just the US that produces this particular type of failure.
The Leninist party-state the Soviets built outlasted the withdrawal, but...
How are those Post-colonial Westminster constitutions in Africa going?
How many generations do you think it would take to get the 'foundational stuff' sorted locally? How quckily / harshly would you have to filter those generations to produce a foundation of human capital capable of operating American style institutions and infrastructure?
That's very much my point. The US (and, indeed, any outsidde power) should have aimed to put in place a local style government with local style institutions and a local style military, but thought that all you needed to do was say "hey presto, democracy!" and everything else would fall into place. Too much idealism, not enough cynicism. Of course, the latter wouldn't have played well domestically.
That's who we were fighting.
The Taliban are a strange outlier by historical Afghan standards. Generally, Afghanistan has been governed by a centralized Kabul regime which distributes foreign patronage to provincial strongmen in return for nominal fealty. In theory we could have done something similar with Karzai, but he and his cronies just stole all the money instead of delivering it to clients.
Zahir Shah may have been a better choice, but I suspect all the alternatives are just different versions of failure.
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