Top 10 mistakes made in the Afghan War

1. Sticking to contractors for translation services and not expanding DLI to produce qualified people. Works over time. After a few deployments, the Army would have had all the in-house assets needed for the job.

2. A lot of political nonsense about the poppies. True, poppies are a big problem in Afghanistan, but we should have provided some sort of economic incentive to have helped the Afghans transition out of poppy production, like for example, farming or other agriculture.

3. Not sealing the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

4. Karzai was a bad character to trust from the start.

5. Karzai's brothers were no better

6. Should have sealed the border between Afghanistan and Iran. That right there would have cut down the opium trade by at least 50%

7. More effort to gain buy-in with tribal leaders and less wasting time thinking the so-called Afghan government was a worthy player.

8. The Afghan Banking system was a mess from the start, Karzai's brothers looted what was left. Had that not been the case, Afghanistan could have had a small but sustainable financial sector by now.

9. Iraq took much of the focus, thus the Taliban came back

10. The Taliban should have been defined more vigorously as an existential threat to the US and its allies. Instead, the focus got shifted to Saddam and Iraq, and everyone forgot that the Taliban harbored Al Qaeda.

I believe a mistake was not to spray defoliant on the Poppy fields, then advise the tribal leaders that if they did not come to an agreement to settle this conflict they would not grow poppies for many years. There is justification because the profits were used to support the conflict, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other hot spots in the Middle East. Afghanistan produces 90 % of the Opium world wide, the thought of their poppy fields barren for years to come will get their attention.