Further to my post below, a recent (and rather senior) returnee from Afghanistan writes:

I agree with your assessment. We are muddled and unfocused, saddled with a lack of resources and a fractured chain of command. Further, even were we to commit fully to nation building it would take us decades to succeed. There is not much there to allow a stable nation to cohere and even less reason to believe that that entity would share our interests for long.

Afghanistan is supposed to be “the good war” — the one that Europe got on board with (mostly after the fall of the Taliban) in order to demonstrate, in the run-up to Iraq, that they weren’t opposed to war in general. The trouble is when “the international community” goes to war it can only do so in pursuit not of its various national interests but of a kind of pious, collective national disinterest, usually dignified under the term “nation-building.” Eight years after 9/11, a semantic accommodation is corroding any strategy.