Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "Why America Invaded Afghanistan in the First Place" video.

@TLTeo not even for a few years. Most units served a year or less before being rotated. So you’re interfacing with community leaders that know you won’t be there next year. In those conditions, it’s impossible to build the trust necessary for successful counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency is complicated and hard to do successfully. There is no one size fits all formula. COIN programs must be tailored to each country, or even regions within a country. And even if a really good plan is formulated, errors in execution of the plan can make success impossible. Contradictory policies are just a fact of life, but balancing them is particularly difficult. You can’t “win hearts and minds” without securing an area through force of arms, but force of arms undermines the winning of hearts and minds. A very-hard-to-win situation quickly devolves into a no-win situation if you can’t achieve and maintain that balance.
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The problem is when we use the military for nation building in places we are not welcome. There are plenty of developing countries that would be happy to accept our aid if invasion and occupation wasn’t part of the equation. Sadly, very few of these countries have oil.
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@alexmclean760 Romans? You’re probably thinking of Alexander the Great, who was Macedonian/Greek. The Romans never made it that far.
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Long term special ops need bases and support, not to mention a larger force to secure those bases—and that larger force needs its own bases to secure themselves. Small groups of special ops living off the land or long term embedded in friendly forces is not realistic. The Green Berets who secured Montagnard hamlets in Vietnam had a massive infrastructure behind them inside of Vietnam. Special ops is hard. Counter insurgency is hard. Part of the problem is that Bush’s administration, particularly the defense department, took its eye off the ball when it invaded Iraq unnecessarily (and based on ginned up evidence by Rumsfeld’s deputies). Obama should have declared victory and left when Bin Laden was killed. He would have taken a lot of heat, but it would have been the right thing to do.
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