Too many Afghanistan doom warnings!

I know it looks bad. The Taliban are going whoopee and advancing across Afghanistan, seizing districts so easily you wonder what the hell all those armed Afghan national security troops are doing for their wages, paid incidentally by the Pentagon. Well, they're running away in droves. So much for all those years of training. Anyway that's not what I'm on about. What I do get fed up with are all the people, military, spooks and others who played their part in the 20-year war one way or another and are now retired and are saying what a disaster it all was and what a terrible disaster it still is and how it's all going to go downhill into the black depths in the next few months when all foreign troops, especially the Americans, have vanished. Sir Alex Younger, retired chief of MI6 or the British secret intelligence service, is the latest to come out of the woodwork and accuse the West of getting it all wrong and failing to build a decent democratic nation and failing to get rid of the Taliban. Ok, fine but he was head of the British spooks, including the very large MI6 station in Kabul, from 2014 to 2020, a key period in the attempted nation-building programme after the combat phase had ended. Of course it's not his fault that Afghanistan remains a nation in crisis, but he was there among the top people making decisions and recommendations. Did he during that time warn everyone that we were heading down the wrong road and, if so, did no one listen? I listened to literally hundreds of different military commanders talking about Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, embedded with military units as they took on the Taliban, interviewed aid workers, health workers, NGOs and local Afghans all over the place and none of them thought the US-led coalition was going to win a great victory over the Taliban and turn the country into a cross between North Dakota and the garden of England (the county of Kent). The only message I got from the military whether generals or majors or captains or sergeants was that they were makng progress and holding back the Taliban. That was it. All the finest military brains in the business were hard at it and none of them seemed to grasp the simple fact that the Taliban are Afghans and therefore they were never going to go away. They believed and still believe, they had a legitimate cause and an entitlement to political power like any other Afghan faction and were prepared to fight for it. So foreign troops occupying large chunks of what they say is their land were never going to win. So don't come weepng tears now after it is all over and complain that it should have been done differently. There wasn't a different way, other than not doing it at all. What was totally wrong was to send 130,000 American and coalition troops to sort out the country. It was never going to happen and all those who thought it was possible, especially those now whingeing about the disaster ahead, should in my view accept some of the responsibility and admit the mega mistakes made over 20 years.