After 8 years of pursuit, Afghanistan remains an unbuilt nation

Announcing that Gen. David Petraeus would replace the defenestrated Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of the war in Afghanistan, President Obama was emphatic in saying that this was a change in people, not in policy.

That policy, which Obama described in a February 2009 interview with Jim Lehrer, was "that is that we make sure that [Afghanistan is] not a safe haven for al-Qaida, they are not able to launch attacks of the sort that happened on 9/11 against the American homeland or American interest." And that was George Bush's goal. The strategy Bush chose to accomplish it -- and the one Obama is continuing -- is nation-building, also known as "counterinsurgency" in military lingo.

By the end of August, over 100,000 U.S. troops will be engaged in the counterinsurgency campaign and in less than a year the final curtain will begin to fall on the greatest wartime mistake America has made since Lyndon Johnson put Robert McNamara in charge of the Vietnam War: the strategy of nation-building.

Though he campaigned against it, President Bush embraced nation-building in January 2003 when he chose a nation-building plan for post-war Iraq authored by Colin Powell and George Tenet over the plan for a brief invasion written by Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Myers. And, by default, nation-building was decided upon for Afghanistan as well.

We are now close to the end of the ninth year of our counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan and success -- as defined by Bush and Obama -- is nowhere in sight.