I thought the US lost in Afghanistan and Vietnam. Am I misunderstanding something in your post?

Yes I think you are misunderstanding. The leaner forces in all of the cases above are not the US, but the opposition.

Politically, not militarily. Same in Afghanistan. US could and did easily win the conventional parts of both conflicts. They lost because they didn’t know what to do after that or didn’t want to escalate it into a full scale war (Vietnam).

The US might have lost lots of wars but it is a clear winner in the propaganda front (at least until recently). The parent is a manifestation of that.

No, you both misunderstood what I said. Lean forces win. The US isn't one. My question is why then does the US waste on bulky investments.

The Taliban/Mujahideen didn’t win per se, they just survived long enough for the foreign “empires” to lose interest.

Vietnam wasn’t a conventional conflict either. If you’re willing to lose complete control of most of “your” country and sustain 10x higher casualties than your opponent you might have a chance, but that’s an extremely steep price to pay.

> The Taliban/Mujahideen didn’t win per se, they just survived long enough for the foreign “empires” to lose interest.

So, they won.

That’s the most interesting way to warp reality that I’ve seen.

Afghanistan won, period. It doesn’t matter how Americans would like to advertise their loss - you didn’t “lose interest”, you lost, abandoned the people who were helping you, and have left thousands of innocent civilians to fend for themselves. Afghanistan is, and should be treated as, the biggest failure of the American “empire”.

If you really think the US went all in on Afghanistan with a world war level effort to conquer the country then I don't know what to tell you. After the initial invasion period the country really was a sideshow and became increasingly less prioritized over the years. By the end of the occupation US forces had shrunk to a minuscule size compared to what an invading army would look like.

That doesn't mean that the war was handled well, it clearly wasn't. But looking at a small force and confusing that with the entire might of the US military is baffling to me. "Losing interest" is a perfectly reasonable description of what happened.

Now, now iraq and syria were pretty big defeats too. Red lines over which third world dictators stepoed pretty invurnerable.

For starters I would say that Afghanistan certainly lost. Taliban might have won but certainly not Afghanistan.

> Americans would like to advertise their loss

I couldn’t care less about that. Fact is that the defeat was primarily and almost entirely political, not a military one.

> should be treated as, the biggest failure of the American

Trump: Hold my diet coke

unless the entire goal is to fund various militia groups within the middle east to cause chaos and ensure the ottoman empire cannot rise again and unite under allah while you fund a war to let the oligarchs plunder the natural resources.

"That's the bet!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkz-CQdmNn0