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Notes -
I'll bite.
When was the Afghanistan war lost? I stand to be corrected, but it seems to me that across twenty years and four presidents, there is no obvious answer better than 2001, when we committed ourselves to invading, occupying and democratizing the country. I do not think you can point to a time past that point when we stood a better chance of securing a better outcome, in terms of costs and benefits, than before the war began. Everything that followed really does seem to have flown downhill from that point, from the sort of people who were in charge, the ideological commitments that defined them, the nature of our country and our military, and the realities of the nation we chose to invade.
If I'm wrong, it seems to me that the way to demonstrate it would be to point to some inflection point post-invasion, a before and after where things took a turn for the worse. But from what I can see, there is no such inflection point. From the moment American boots hit Afghan soil till the moment they left, America had the ability to utterly dominate Afghanistan militarily, at a significant cost in blood and treasure and human misery, and for zero tangible benefit. I have never seen evidence that it was ever going to get better, or that it ever was going to end any other way but how it did. We were always going to pay far too much for far too little until we eventually decided to stop paying. The only way to improve that calculus would have been to stop paying sooner, or ideally not pay at all.
You seem to be arguing that the nation-building was poorly executed, with the implication that it could have been done successfully. That may be true in some theoretical sense, but I see no plausible scenario where America actually does a better job of occupying and nation-building than we saw in reality. I don't think Gore, Kerry, Romney, McCain, Hillary or indeed Trump would have done any better than their respective opponents actually did. I don't think shuffling pentagon or state department officials around would have changed anything. I don't think you can actually argue that better outcomes were at hand if only the right people were in charge. I'm pretty confident that, in fact, the "right people" don't exist, then or now.
The best possible outcome I can imagine would be to have conducted the war as a punitive raid, bombed our way in, shot anyone who looked at us funny while hunting Bin Laden, and then rolled back out again once it became clear he was gone. No nation-building, no occupation, no two decades of graft and incompetence and pointless bloodshed so that washington and pentagon apparatchiks could play social studies phd through heavily-armed proxies.
Am I wrong? What am I missing here?
That cause and effect exists?
I'm not sure what you expect to hear. The choice to commit to rebuilding Afghanistan as a democracy rather than the post-war consultation of the tribal elders to return the pre-soviet monarchy weak monarchy was a policy choice. The choice to specifically rebuild Afghanistan as a socially liberal democracy regardless of what the local felt, but then to also not take control of the education system for a generation, was a policy choice. The choice to rebuild Afghanistan as a singular state at all, rather than fracture it into substates that could be it's neighbors problems to influence and sort out, was a policy choice. The choice to withdraw western forces but expect to fly back in to Kabul was a policy choice. Deciding that the guarantee was to fly back in, but abandoning the main military airbase near the capital and limiting yourself to the civilian airport, was a policy choice. Deciding to time the withdrawal to the end of the fighting season, for maximum military and political momentum of the insurgency, for the sake of a symbollic ceremony date was a policy choice.
The way Afghanistan failed was the result of specific policy decisions. Even if you believe that some form of failure was inevitable, the type of failure / the optics of failure / the degree of badness of failure can differ.
Heck, even the strategic consequences of failure can differ. Had the US / western countries tried to double down and surge in support to the Kabul government in fall 2021, that in and of itself could have greatly shifted Western support and approaches to Ukraine, given not only the internal political considerations but other factors like how a re-surge would likely have required access across Russian airspace and provided an exposed vulnerability for Russia to apply coercion to.
I expect to hear how the choices you list weren't made when the war was sold to the public and initiated, and how they might have been made differently either at the point of initiation or at any subsequent point over the next twenty years.
You might reply "well, this guy pushes different keys at his keyboard and a different document comes out, which..." But cause and effect means that all the people plausibly in a position to be pushing the keys are going to push roughly the same keys!
...It seems to me that you are using the word "failure" to refer to the chaotic disaster of a pullout. I am using the word "failure" in reference to the stated goals of the invasion and occupation, the goals that were used to sell it to the American public, not least among them the soldiers who volunteered to serve there. I don't care about the events of the pullout at all, and do not consider it a failure, because unlike the entire rest of the war, it did what it was supposed to do: by the end of it, we were out. Sure it was a complete disaster from a tactical perspective, and sure the people who made it happen like that should probably be fired and jailed for criminal incompetence, though it seems to me that we might disagree over who those people actually were. Confining ourselves to the pullout specifically, maybe different people might have delivered different results! But the objective was in fact achieved, something that cannot be said for any other part of that two-decade disaster.
In any case, leaving the pullout aside, the specific policy decisions you note were the product of institutional culture. Given the institutional culture, not only was failure inevitable, but I am convinced that the specific form of failure that we got was inevitable. I don't think presidential or congressional elections flipping would have changed it. I don't see any plausible staffing decisions flipping that would have changed it either. The initial decisions were the sort of bad that our institutions reliably produce, and once locked in, those institutions are far too sclerotic to make significant course corrections even if someone in control had wanted to, which no one did.
In short, it seems to me that we committed ourselves to impractical objectives, and then spent twenty years pretending otherwise at great expense in terms of treasure and human misery.
Who would have seen that as a plausible benefit to an Afghanistan surge, rather than further confirmation that a pullout was the correct choice? And for what? How would such a surge have moved us closer to "victory" in any meaningful sense, as opposed to simply further delaying the admission of a failure present more or less from the start?
Sure, "things could happen differently". I could bet on black a hundred times in a row at roulette and end up a gajillionaire. But that's not actually going to happen, firstly because the laws of probability don't work that way, and secondly because I don't gamble. In the same way, it seems to me that the actions and outcomes we observe were overwhelmingly probable both because of the actions taken, and because the people taking action are inclined to these actions by training and temperment.
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