Yes, even I think the Taliban won. Not so much against Western forces - because it was never really a war. Just another stupid policing action that lasted far too long. In a real war - you win, by killing lots of people - so many, that the other side ceases hostilities and surrenders. There seems to be some long-evident confusion in US leadership about how to win a war - or more precisely, what a war actually is. You win by killing the other side. That is the only way you win for a long-term victory.
It worked in Germany, and it worked in Japan. That's how wars are won.
I have advocated for decades that the US has wrongly prosecuted wars. Vietnam was the first utter failure to fight an actual war. The Middle East fiascos are much the same. The US has been lost in some stupid fantasy, that their enemies are closet democrats. No, those enemies - they are real enemies and nothing else. To win a war against them - you have to kill as many as you can.
Real wars depend on massive casualties on the other side. For the US, that all could have been done from the air. You can bomb anyone enough and you will reach a massive casualty total that makes surrender the only possible outcome. There has never been a need for boots on the ground. But the dumb professional war-losers have been excellent puppets for the military industrial manufacturers. Most of the wasted trillions on Afghanistan went to them. The rest went to pervasive and cultural Afghan corruption.
