In the wake of Veterans Day, it’s easy to look away from the catastrophe in Afghanistan, because none of you were ever looking at it in the first place. But don’t worry, I’m here to help you build up a glut of righteous indignation about it. Bad things happened for a long time, but my participation or involvement therein is not relevant to this bit of thought leadership I am currently sharing with you.

If leaders send men and women into battle without dedicating themselves to achieving a worthy outcome, you should listen to them when they retire and embark on a second career of highly lucrative reputation repair. While in uniform I advocated for our military staying the course in pursuit of dubious, tactically unattainable goals, and now that I am retired, I get to double down on that sort of talk with even fewer repercussions and a massive upside.

I’m even non-partisan about it: I can say objectively and without offering any substantiating detail that three presidents gave up on winning this war. Sure, no generals ever defined what ‘winning’ was, nor did they demand any strategic thought from civilian leaders. Sort of like during Vietnam. I think there’s a book about that…Dereliction something something. But I digress. The real reason we lost in Afghanistan is a big philosophical term that can mean anything you want it to: post-modernist theories.