As the old adage goes, "hindsight is 20/20," and this hindsight often reveals new truths and understandings we did not see beforehand.
From this perfect vision hindsight, the West should be learning from past mistakes, but we are not. Afghanistan is a good example.
We should seek answers to our failures and then apply our new found knowledge to new situations. Are our failures related to our philosophies, our false beliefs, our approaches, our methods, our intentions, our misunderstandings, our over-simplifications of other cultures? Perhaps, all of the above are applicable which, produces the same, inevitable result - failure.
If we examine Afghanistan as a case study, we must go back to 1979 and the invasion of that country by the U.S.S.R. in an attempt to prop up a weak, badly failing Communist regime.
The U.S.S.R.'s efforts were sure to fail eventually but the U.S., through Charlie Wilson's War, sped things up dramatically.
The U.S. succeeded in bringing down Kabul's communist regime, but it set off a series of unwanted, highly undesirable and completely unexpected outcomes which came back to haunt them in a most dramatic, world-changing way, 9-11.
In its support of the Afghan mujahedeen with its generous supply of small arms, money and especially the Stinger - ground-to-air missiles which brought the backbone of the U.S.S.R.'s tactical, gunship air war to a standstill - the political arm of the mujahedeen, the Taliban, came to power.
This was anything but an improvement and not the desired outcome which resulted in a zero-sum game for East and West superpowers through their proxy war.
In fact, it made the end result much worse because Western powers gave no forethought to what would happen after the U.S.S.R.'s exit from Afghanistan.
For the U.S.S.R., it brought about many internal political changes, and for the West it planted the seeds of war not seen until two decades later.
With the Taliban firmly in power, Afghanistan reverted to a backward-looking, medieval-type government with living conditions and laws to match.
Suffering was worse for women due to their harsh applications of ancient Shariah Law.
This same Taliban government gave refuge to many, radical Islamists bent on making attacks on Westerners in the Middle East, and elsewhere, and to extremist groups like al-Qaida.
The al-Qaida organization, led by Osama bin Laden, which had the most money and was the most determined, hatched various plots against the U.S. in spite of the fact that it had been instrumental in repulsing the U.S.S.R. invasion.
The Americans were first used and later abused, despite their good intentions.
After 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban government was replaced by a national government which was neither respected by all Afghans nor shown to be highly effective.
Afghanistan today remains bitterly divided between Pashtuns, and their Taliban allies, and the installed (later democratically elected) Hamid Karzai pro-Western government.
Unremarkably, Iraq today has a highly similar situation with a weak, ineffective, pro-Western central government (mainly Shiite), a separatist state in the north-east (Kurdish), a disgruntled, almost-disenfranchised minority population (Sunni), and infiltration by al-Qaida extremists not previously found in Iraq.
With political leanings toward Iran (also Shiite), the situation in Iraq may easily spin out-of-control at any time.
Establishing Western-style democracy by military force is easy enough, but changing customs, traditions and Eastern lifestyles - firmly established by ethnicity, religion and regional politics over several millennia - and entrenching them permanently is another matter entirely.
Western strategists who believe that modernizing Third World countries to our desires, and establishing model, pro-Western style governments with Western ways is a slam-dunk, achievable overnight through self-evident truths, are definitely living in a fool's paradise.
