Afghanistan: more echoes of the Soviet experience

Over at Slate, Frank Kaplan writes that NATO forces in Afghanistan are starting to shift their focus from the state-building aspects of COIN to more traditional military operations. Not that the state building effort is dead, writes Kaplan, but “U.S. and NATO officers, intelligence analysts, and other officials and advisers now believe that our objectives in the Afghanistan war can no longer be accomplished in sufficiently short time through COIN alone or even through a COIN-dominant strategy.”