it's not about politics, it's about the US not having learnt anything from Vietnam. The locals know the armed forces present will leave at some time, so any "solution" can't be strictly military. (And no, you couldn't win this war in the first place, precisely because the US military don't give a rat's ass about the Afghans - and the Afghans know it.)
Nonsense.
The US government and military has known for a very long time that sustainable victory in these sorts of circumstances comes from political solutions crafted in conjunction with and playing off of military ones. It's obvious. That's the way any war works. There's no such thing as a purely military solution to a conflict. The problem here, as in Viet Nam, is that the political solution fundamentally depends on an allied government that the United States cannot control except in the broadest terms. America could not and can not occupy an entire country forever; that is left to local troops and, eventually,
gendarmerie. The US couldn't force the Republic of Viet Nam to create a state that was acceptable to enough of its citizens to be viable in the face of the VC and the NVA. And it can't force Hamid Karzai and the rest of the erstwhile Northern Alliance to create a state that is viable in the face of the innumerable warlords of Afghanistan.
It is very obvious that the United States military and political leadership has always been cognizant of these issues. This is where Vietnamization came from, and it's why the Paris Peace Accords took the shape that they did. Much like the Soviets and the RoA, the RVN was expected to be able to enjoy continuing indirect American aid, converted to direct aid on the resumption of actual hostilities. And much like the RoA, the RVN did not receive that aid due to internal-political problems in the allied country. American policy in Viet Nam did not achieve a victory, but neither did it sustain a defeat until after Watergate effectively immobilized the government. And the Soviet Union similarly was not meaningfully defeated in Afghanistan until long after the Soviet state itself had ceased to exist.
This does not mean that no situation could ever have been created that could be reasonably construed as an American "victory" in either Afghanistan or Viet Nam. And it also doesn't mean that the American-led war effort in either country was perfectly executed and flawless. Neither one of those things is true, which should be obvious to even the most casual observer. But at this point what the US Army does is decreasingly relevant in the face of the inabilities of the American and Afghan governments to craft a political solution to the war.
As for the claim that the US isn't interested in the "people" of Afghanistan, it's
prima facie absurd. The military isn't, generally speaking, interested in the overall welfare and prosperity of anybody more than any other group of people, and individual soldiers certainly have expressed bigoted opinions of Afghans, and even acted on those opinions, yes. There have been friendly fire incidents, and communications failures, but those are hardly indicative of a general problem. And the greater part of ISAF's mission in Afghanistan ever since 2002 has been to train the Afghan military and police force to be able to stand on their own feet. American soldiers have died fighting alongside those Afghans, and they have died at the hands of traitors within Afghan ranks while working together with local forces. Afghanistan's infrastructure, to the extent that it even exists today, is due almost entirely to ISAF - its militaries and its civilian contractors. To the extent that any force can be reasonably expected to cooperate with its allies, ISAF's militaries fit the bill.
