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How the US lied and lost Afghanistan

Uncle Sam is approaching this new round of talks rather on the back foot.

Try as I might, I just can't wrap my head around this Afghan peace process, despite covering chunks of this war from here (Pakistan) as well as Afghanistan. Turns out everybody involved is going to give the chance for peace one more push, even though US President Donald Trump himself dubbed the process "dead" just this September.
Now, since the Taleban didn't change their position at all, and the Americans first pulled out then jumped right back in, isn't it Uncle Sam that is approaching this new round of talks rather on the back foot?
But that's hardly the only strange thing about this peace process. I bet you nobody was saying 'why fight at all if we're going to make up at the end?' back when the war began.
Nobody in the US at least. Even then, 'why end like this after fighting the longest, most expensive war in US history?' is still a pretty pertinent question, isn't it, especially since nobody's sure if many of the original goals have been achieved.
Plus, how sincere do you look if you engage good old Zalmay Khalilzad (US special envoy) to get everybody on the same page about a ceasefire and an eventual US withdrawal? He was a disaster as US ambassador to Iraq, a complete flop as ambassador to UN, and all he achieved as ambassador to Afghanistan was to get tribes he didn't like to fight with each other; further enrich the theatre of war, so to speak.
And since he's known for his rather unique solutions to complex problems, he didn't surprise as special envoy at all, even if the result was hitting a brick wall, like every other time. His smart idea to finally end the war was bypassing the legitimate Afghan government completely and talking directly to the Taleban. And, no matter what anybody says, everybody knows that Zalmay cut off Kabul completely from the negotiations because the Taleban would simply not recognise the official government. And if the Taleban didn't talk he'd have nothing to take back to Trump. So if that meant he'd have to leave Afghan President Ashraf Ghani scratching his head, then so be it.
Problem is, the Americans had spent the last decade and a half, not to mention more than a trillion dollars, not just fighting the Taleban but also erecting the Kabul administration.
For him to suddenly sideline Kabul, that too to talk to the people Washington initially started the war on, was a little too much for people across the region to digest even if the Americans saw 'much progress' in it. And practically no body from the Khyber Pass to Kandahar expected the process to continue much longer when the Taleiban began calling for an interim government and a fresh, more shariah compliant (in their point of view), constitution.
So Trump's snub, even if it was disguised as an angry reaction to one more American's killing in this long war, made sense to me. He wasn't about to go down in history as the president who made a horribly off course misadventure even more horrible. And, for lack of better options, I more or less knew that the Americans would find a way of going back to the table. But I was sure that Trump would sack Zalmay and throw his smart idea, of isolating the government in favour of the Taleban, out the window.
That is why waking up to headlines about 'picking the peace process right where we left it', spearheaded by Zalmay, left me at a loss for words. In the years that I've covered this war, from the ground and the comfort of the newsroom, I've not come across too many people who would give such a strategy much thought. Well, perhaps a few, since the Imran Khan cabinet seriously subscribed to this point of view till, apparently, the Pakistani military started believing otherwise.
What a fine time then, among all this confusion, for the Washington Post to come out with their Afghanistan Papers? Now everybody knows that the Americans - two two-term administrations and not Trump's team - have been groping in the dark, hoping and wishing that their superior military machine would somehow win this war at the end of the day.
Worse, still, are findings that the world's sole superpower - which started this war in a quest for justice, didn't it? - didn't mind fudging facts and figures and blatantly lying about progress on the ground.
I hate fables about rugged, almost nomadic Afghans killing superpower after superpower, generation after generation, primarily because they are not true. But stories about the Afghans defeating the Brits and Soviets in centuries past are also true. And, spin it as you like, it's also true that the Americans will leave humbled. They've lost, they've just not been told so by their leaders yet.
- The writer is a senior journalist based in Lahore, Pakistan