Comments by "Tim Trewyn" (@timtrewyn453) on "Full McMaster Interview: 'This War Ended In Self-Defeat'" video.

  1. I don't know that troops that did multiple tours see it quite the same way as single tour generals who put in a year see it. Did any overall mission commander who served in Afghanistan strenuously volunteer to extend his or her tour of duty in Afghanistan if they also saw continuity of the commander as an issue? Does it really take 20 years to come up with this critique in hindsight? Bush, Obama, and Trump and their NSC's all missed this? Were Afghan Army losses over the last 5 years sustainable? I've heard they suffered over 60,000 fatalities. And the mechanism of payment of Afghan soldiers was wrong. A separate military unit with high integrity should be in charge of pay and soldiers should have to show up in person to draw their pay under those circumstances. How many Afghan prisoners did Trump send to Gitmo? McMaster did not convince me he learned much from this. The Afghan Army and its intelligence and counter-intelligence services needed to be advised to determine the quantity of provinces that they could sustainably hold, understanding those areas would be subject to Taliban espionage and hit and run strikes, and the capacity it needed to conduct espionage and hit and run warfare on the Taliban in territory it held. That might have created a sustainable stalemate with more balanced losses, creating at least a possibility of selected cease fire areas and provincial settlements. Both sides would have been on "Afghan time." But the whole matter of American "tribute" payments to Pakistan, with some of it being rerouted to the Taliban, would have had to have been minimized. Pakistan is seeing the US lean toward India, and they have to work against that for their own interests.
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