Afghanistan: Why a ‘Limited-Win’ is Sustainable

June 18, 2012 by Daniel Wagner

Rising disenchantment with the “good war” in Afghanistan ultimately stems from the unrealistically high expectations set by NATO in the early years of the conflict, as well as a rising degree of frustration at the lack of tangible, sustainanable progress.

Afghanistan was always going to be an impoverished, conflict-ridden, landlocked, and fractured country; it was never going to be the Switzerland, or even the Philippines, of Central Asia. Last-ditch attempts at nation building, after years of under-resourcing due to the Iraq war, were simply doomed to fail.  Although NATO cannot create the Afghanistan it once hoped to build, it is probably still able to achieve some narrow security objectives past 2014, a strategy somewhat derisively known as “Afghanistan Good Enough”.

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