"We never got it. Not even close."

DEMPSEY: One caution I have is a lot of folks look at the Afghans—they look at patronage networks, they look at a lack of adherence to the chain of command, they look at a lack of belief in structures—and they impute a moral judgment upon the Afghans for that. It took me a long time to realize that Afghans are no different than us. Their incentives are no different than ours. The challenge is, what is it that’s causing them to act that way? The reality was we tried to build a military and a security force for a state that didn’t exist. We forget the things that enable our military to exist the way it does. Our military relies on a strong and legitimate central government. It relies on effective bureaucracies. It relies on lack of corruption and commitment to rule of law, the absence of sectarian division, a literate population and recruiting base. Those don’t exist in Afghanistan.

And again, this is not a moral judgment. But for us to walk in and say your tribe, your people, your family, all these things that have kept you alive for the last 20, 30 years of war, we would now like you to ignore all of that and pretend that you’re going to be loyal to a chain of command structure that we drew out of thin air and wrote down on paper, that doesn’t account for ethnicity, tribal loyalty, the way the world works?

There’s a whole ton of hubris, arrogance and ignorance that drives the way the American military dealt with the Afghans. We built a system that worked for us instead of thinking about: What can we build for the Afghans, what’s feasible, what’s attainable, what’s realistic? Instead, we just said what we want, what’s perfect. And we never got it. Not even close.