We went to war in Afghanistan (and Iraq) without the military that we needed for the mission. The problem, of course, was not our military. The problem was the mission. The US military simply was not created, and does not exist, for the purposes we have been using it for decades.
As for the manpower aspect of the problem, the bureaucracy found a square peg for the round hole and began pulling Sailors from Navy units. These Sailors, called Individual Augmentees (IAs), would then be dispersed among the various Army and Marine Corps units on the ground throughout the Central Command (CENTCOM) Area of Responsibility. Many of the earliest IAs became orphans to the Navy, with little connection (if any) to their parent commands, and no connection whatsoever to CENTCOM. It was an administrative mess.
As a young Yeoman Second Class (SW/AW) on staff at NAVCENT (the Navy’s component of CENTCOM), I found myself at the center of the Navy’s effort to establish the administrative support network needed to facilitate the IA mission. I served as the executive assistant and personal security officer for a high-ranking official who preferred to go personally visit all of the orphaned Sailors himself. To get from one point to another, we usually suited up and rode out on Army or Marine Corps ground combat patrols. In Afghanistan, we did a lot of flying. We spent time at the various bases and outposts in the provinces of Parwan (where Bagram Air Field is located), Ghazni, Paktia, Khost, Kandahar, Kabul, and Kunar in the N2KL region. These are mostly located near or on the border of Pakistan, in the heart of Taliban territory.
When receiving a distinguished visitor (DV) such as my boss, standard operating procedure was to have some sort of presentation ready for the occasion. Once the DV had their coffee, and took their seat in the room where meetings happened, a succession of military and/or civilian officials would then present a series of slides containing numbers and facts, all of which pointed to the inevitable conclusion that the mission was being accomplished.
I attended countless such meetings, and the mission was always being accomplished. The roads and schools were always getting built. The temporary loyalties of tribal elders, whom we knew we could not trust, was always recently secured with yet another bag of cash. The girls were all learning how to read. Our provincial reconstruction teams were never failing to rebuild Afghanistan as a bastion of democracy in the Hindu Kush.
Once the meetings were over, however, the same people who presented the slides would then be free to discuss why none of it mattered. The people of Afghanistan mostly do not trust us, do not like us, and do not want us in their country. The government we created for them was largely corrupt, and widely resented. The Afghan National Army was 90% useless at any given time, and looked good on paper only. None of it was going to survive our withdrawal. Many Afghans understood all along that they had a better chance of survival if they refused to deal with us. The Taliban were just waiting for us to leave so they could retake Kabul.
People of all political persuasions have been saying for many years that our war in Afghanistan was a total farce. I was convinced when I saw it for myself. We beat the Taliban in December of 2001 when we chased them out of Afghanistan. The moment we decided to settle in for a perpetual nation-building occupation, the Taliban beat us. We have been watching them take their country back, right out from under us, for two decades. We could do nothing to stop it. We can talk tough all we want, but look where that got us. We sent troops into Afghanistan, for two decades, to die for nothing. There are a lot of good people in Afghanistan who believed in us. They wanted our way of life. Potentially millions of Afghans supported us in some way over the last twenty years, whether by word or deed. We can pat ourselves on the back for giving them a taste of the modern age, but they are doomed now, and we always knew it would come to this.
Everything we have done in Afghanistan has backfired. Those who call for us to re-invade and re-occupy must be ignored.