In defense of the much-maligned foreign policy establishment

National security leaders, generals in particular, are now reviled for not winning the war, but that was never the mission. Learning from Vietnam, policymakers soon realized that it would be too hard to extinguish an entrenched insurgency with cross-border support. So they settled for not losing rather than winning. That helps to explain why the U.S. military toll in Afghanistan (2,461 killed) was so much lower than in Vietnam (58,220 killed). Arguably the mission in Afghanistan was accomplished — the war was a stalemate before President Biden, himself a long-standing member of the establishment, pulled the plug.