> How else am I then to interpret this paragraph?

I think you're having trouble interpreting it simply because you don't know what you're talking about. You don't know the significance of those dates, for example, so you probably can't imagine why I left 1979 off that list. You don't know how the country evolved throughout the British occupation, so you have no idea how absurd it is to talk about how "westernized" it was. This stuff is obvious to anyone who knows anything about the country's history.

The real problem is that your question doesn't even make sense. It makes no sense to posit whether Afghanistan has changed, because Afghanistan isn't a single entity. It's barely even a country. So the answer is yes and no. Vast rural areas are indeed almost unchanged since the pre-British era; life in eastern mountain valleys, for example, looks pretty much the same as it did a hundred years ago, with the notable and somewhat jarring exception of cell phones. Kabul and Khandahar on the other hand went through drastic changes mid-century. These are essentially different countries.

> The mistake is the same only if the objective is mostly the same and the country is mostly the same. If not, then your bold "could've seen that one coming!"-claim just falls apart.

That's some interesting logic. I and others who predicted failure in Afghanistan over twenty years ago were unaware of these rules, and yet we somehow managed to predict the course of the conflict. That could just be a total coincidence. Or it could be that a deep knowledge of the country and its history allows one to analyze the long sequence of conflicts there, differences and commonalities between the various actors and conditions of the country across those times, and then draw informed predictions. Do you think maybe a few books were written about this exact topic?

> In particular, to disregard the rise of Islamism and the power-grab of the Taliban that preceded the US invasion appears willfully ignorant.

You might be surprised to learn (and I'm guessing you'll actually be surprised) that the rise of militant Islamism did not make us more likely to win. Regardless, both the Brits and the Ruskies, who had very difference experiences in Afghanistan in many ways, including the absence and presence of militant Islamism respectively, were nevertheless able to confidently tell us that our own little project was almost certainly doomed. And hey, they were right, imagine that.

There aren't any "premises" here that have to be defended. This is just information about our countries and their common history that is easily accessible to you if you cared to find it. You could start with Edward Ingram's paper that I cited in a different comment.

Look, this is all pretty simple. Your claim was, "only in hindsight is it obvious that Afghanistan could not be turned around". This claim is idiotic. Not only idiotic; it's eye-rollingly, mind-numbingly stupid. Lots and lots of people knew exactly what was going to happen, and they've been proven right at every turn. And nobody on the other side of the debate, not even the most die-hard neocons, made the argument that our victory was assured. The neocon argument involved a lot of technical hand waiving about America's strength in intel and covert ops, but none of them was stupid enough to claim that failure was unforseeable, like you're claiming. Go read Doug Feith's book. Or Wolfowitz and Perle. Or anything.

Even worse was your second claim, that after trillions dollars and tens of thousands of lives lost, the "mistake was worth making". This is some arrogant, ignorant, first-world tech-bro idiocy that I don't even deem worthy of spending time on, so I didn't.

I have to say, as fun as it is for me to point and make fun, I probably won't come back to this thread.