We must learn lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan

Waltz writes that Afghanistan would have to be stabilized one village at time, which will require an enormous investment of time, most of all. We did not fully understand the difficulty of a war in Afghanistan. “In Afghanistan,” Waltz wrote, “we had a country with a larger population than Iraq’s that was sprawled across some of the most difficult terrain on Earth with little infrastructure, no natural resources or tax base, no access to seaports, an insurgent sanctuary next door in Pakistan, extreme poverty and a horrid 75 percent illiteracy rate.” As an Afghan elder told Waltz, “We must be prepared to commit our grandchildren to stand shoulder to shoulder with his grandchildren.”