"Up until the very last moment, the State Department believed that it could co-opt the Taliban into the political system they had set up in Afghanistan. Victory had come to be defined as the Taliban seeing reason and deciding to stop being Jihadists.
Jihadists who believe that “Islamic law will come not to just Afghanistan, but all over the world” are not interested in playing Let’s Make a Deal except as Taqiyya to keep the infidels off-balance.
The Taliban play to win. We don’t.
That’s the simple answer to why we haven’t won wars in a long time and aren’t about to start.
American soldiers are the best. They win battles all the time. When faced against an enemy that will stand and fight, our men roll over them. We aren’t losing those kinds of battles: we keep losing wars in which the leaders can’t define what a war is or what victory looks like in military terms."
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