Is Afghanistan an intellectual failure or a military failure?

For 20 years they were told the war is going fine. The Afghan army is going to be able to hold on against the Taliban. But, the reality we saw is totally collapsed just after two weeks after the withdrawal of the US and NATO forces.

In the past 20 years of western academia scholars on Pakistan and Afghanistan articulated the antipathetic narrative. Just see how the western intellectual elite had continued to look at Afghanistan from a very narrow prism of the US strategic interest.

 

The intellectual laziness was so robust that they didn't even want to understand Afghanistan - who the Aghani people are, how they live, what are the different tribes there, what are their history. And essentially they believe that Afghanistan was a large group of people - one group was a pro-American (the liberals) and the other group whoever it was Taliban. So, this broad generalization thought shows a colonial mindset and that is one of the reasons why Afghanistan is essentially an intellectual failure than a military failure of the US.

There was another failure in a confirmation bias that was created through rigid research - research that had pre-conceived motions about Afghanistan which were used for the policy and that policy articulated to the media than fade that back to the academia and it created a loop (colonizing mind).  

A loop that interprets the colonizers and the imperial power became a victim of its own people lies, a victim of its own propaganda, and a confirmation bias.

One of the best thing that happened out of that entire Afghan crisis is that western academia, western policy, and western media got brutally exposed. Their possessions were essentially about how colonized, how rigid the structure was that ended up damaging themselves.