From the very moment the Pakistan-based Taliban leadership organized a lethal insurgency against the Afghan government, there has been a realization among scholars of the region that Afghanistan’s war could not be settled militarily. The Afghan security forces were too overstretched, unprofessional, and incapable to patrol every corner of Afghanistan. The Taliban were also too few in number and too unpopular to sweep into Kabul like they did in 1996. Afghanistan would be mired in a circular military stalemate regardless of how much firepower, soldiers, and money (nearly $1 trillion) the United States invested otherwise.

U.S. officials have learned the hard way how implausible and futile it was to transplant a Western-style democracy to Afghanistan — one of the poorest, most violent, ungovernable, and corrupt countries on the planet. Ultimately, a political resolution to the war in Afghanistan, if such a resolution exists at all, should be hammered out by the Afghans themselves.