ready. my name is luis vega. i m an army captain, and i served in afghanistan from 2012 to 2013. i remember a lot of briefings of, like, we need to get to the afghan people first before the taliban, and we need to win their hearts and minds. and that s how we re going to win this war. and i thought, okay, that s a unique strategy, but i was in. the problem is you show up with your team of 18 to 20-year-old gung ho patriots that have testosterone coming out their ears and are ready to defend their country, and you re saying we re going to drink some chai tea and talk about how we re going to irrigate this farm, build this well, build this bridge, and all the while, you re going to be maybe attacked, ambushed.
counterinsurgency doesn t work or nation building doesn t work. actually, i disagree. we did counterinsurgency in world war ii. we just did it after the armistice. that s what the marshall plan was. it was building nations that would be durable and resilient against the threat of communism. i think in rural afghanistan, which is most of afghanistan, it has not worked. and generally speaking, dissatisfaction with the government was a greater factor than fear of the taliban. they might dispense harsh justice, but they dispensed justice. the u.s. counterinsurgency strategy in afghanistan failed according to general mckiernan. and we now know there were many who saw it failing as a strategy in real-time. as one member of general stanley mcchrystal s afghanistan assessment team told government investigators, implementing an