We seem to have this doctrine that if we just build enough schools and hospitals, the people will somehow love us and become our friends. They're not going to. They haven't been anybody's friends for 3000 years, and they are not about to start now. Hatred of outsiders is embedded in their culture. The Brits tried and failed, the Russians tried and failed, so why should we entertain any serious notion of success.

What armies do best is to kill people and to break things. The approach should have been go in hard and fast, kill everybody that needs killing, break everything that needs breaking, GTFO, and stay TFO. And leave whoever is in charge with the firm expectation that if they screw up, we will be back to kill them.

Sometimes, armies have to do things other than kill people and break things. There are numerous humanitarian missions every year, and obviously in a situation like post-WWII Europe there was a great need for a different kind of effort.

But in a place where people generally dislike you, and whose only strategic significance is that it harbors people who genuinely hate you, we're not going to win friends and influence people. That is particularly true when a lot of our doing good is going to be perceived as exactly the opposite by a signifiant portion of the population who believe that if Allah wanted you to have a hospital, he wouldn't send a bunch of infidels to build it.

There is a time and a place for nation-building. Afghanistan ain't it. And what is even worse, while we have spent two decades focused on the Middle East, China has been outflanking us in Africa, and now South America. Those are places where we might have been able to engage in worthwhile nation-building, but China has beaten us to it. That may ultimately be the biggest tragedy of all.