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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.
We knew how to win the peace. We choose not to win the peace because doing so would require actions counter to the actual goals. Like so many political "failures" in the US, Afghanistan was just a way of siphoning tax money under the guise of "helping". Actually achieving peace would halt the gravy train and impose political costs.
How would we win “The Peace” in Afghanistan? They aren’t like us.
Victory to me is having as cheap as possible military assets in country to blow up anything that is a future terrorist camp trying to do 9/1
Honestly, that would have been my preference, especially in hindsight. Go in, deliver a punitive expedition, leave after having sent the message. The nation-building and "you break it, you bought it" ideology was well-intentioned, but overly idealistic.
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Pacification of a population has many historical examples to draw on, many of which are well-known and studied. That we choose not to follow them is not due to lack of knowledge but rather due to "morality", which I put in air quotes because I'm pretty confident it is less true belief in said morality than the domestic political benefits of signaling said morality driving the decision.
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This is a fair critique, but the thing is there's just no real opportunity cost to keeping 10k American troops in Afghanistan en perpetuity and lots of cost to leaving. How many troops do we have in Korea and Germany? It's gotta be more than what we had in Afghanistan.
Less than we ended up with in Afghanistan, by a factor of roughly 2 in each case if you count per-capita (more for Germany if you don't), yeah.
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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?
The political goal of post-WW2 British decolonialisation was to hand colonies that had become obviously unprofitable over to governments able and willing to prevent their territory being used by the USSR. I don't think we even pretended that the point was to set up durable democracies.
On that basis, decolonialisation in East Asia was a win (notoriously against serious opposition in Malaya), South Asia was a draw (India was more sympathetic to the USSR than the West, but took nonaligned status seriously), the Middle East was a win (apart from Egypt where we were beaten by American-backed communists who would go on to double-cross the US and side with the USSR), and sub-Saharan Africa was somewhere between a draw and a loss.
Some weren't unprofitable until after the nationalism / shooting had started.
Palestine was a win?
Is your assessment of sub-Saharan Africa now, or at some prior point post independence?
Israel isn't and wasn't pro-USSR. Jordan (which got the West Bank) isn't and wasn't pro-USSR. Egypt (which got Gaza) wasn't pro-USSR until American-backed communists under Nasser couped the British-backed government. So a win by the criterion I stated.
My assessment of sub-Saharan Africa is that Ghana, Zambia and Zimbabwe were pro-USSR during the Cold War, which was a failure of British policy. I don't think the people making decisions in postwar Britain were thinking forward to a future where the USSR no longer existed, so I don't think we can assess their success on the basis of sub-Saharan Africa today.
Because Isreal being pro-USSR would have been horrible?
If containment is the metric for success then Jordan is an example of success.
The Free Officers weren't communists, and they weren't American-backed. They were nationalist army officers, several with Muslim Brotherhood ties, and one of the new regime's first acts was to crush a communist-led strike at Kafr el-Dawwar and hang two of the organisers. Nasser kept Egyptian communists in prison camps through most of his rule, including during the years he was taking Soviet weapons. Alignment with Moscow came in 1955, three years after the coup, and persisted until ~76.
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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.
The Great Game never worked out particularly well for the locals in Afghanistan, and wasn't supposed to. The Taliban, somehow, managed to flip the table and say that Afghanistan wasn't a gamepiece any more. The locals prefer this, and were therefore willing to fight for the Taliban but not for the Karzai government.
Taliban rule is a disaster for urban women (unfortunately) and religious minorities (who are, by definition, minorities). When western journalists and NGOs tried to get rural women to complain about Taliban rule, they basically got "We didn't actually have any more freedom under Pashtunwali but now at least our sons won't end up as bacha bazi boys and a warlord who rapes our daughters will be expected to marry them"
The Great Game and associated Great Power conflicts have generally worked well for Afghanistan until they actually get invaded, because being important meant foreign subsidies and arms for Kabul. Afghans simply do not give a shit about "not being a gamepiece" - they're living in a mountainous subsistence economy, and the strategy of successive Afghan regimes has been to try and make themselves important enough to the rest of the world to get foreign funding they can distribute to the regions as patronage. Note also that Pashtunwali only applies to about half of the country. Thomas Barfield very good on this
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Zahir Shah may have been a better choice, but I suspect all the alternatives are just different versions of failure.
The big issues imo are that the US did not force Karzai to build a proper national patronage network, and that the projects that could have delivered quality-of-life improvements to the average Afghan were run through useless Western NGOs and development agencies. The country runs on "bribery", as all premodern states did, and doesn't understand democracy, so bribe them and stop worrying about voting.
The NGO and development agencies benefit someone, just largely not the average Afghani. The PMC people inhabiting these organizations benefit.
In many instances we cut Karzi out of the chain. Money and contracts would flow through channels he didn't control. This left him competing for clients against his own patron.
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