Afghanistan isn’t a budding state, it’s just a region of the world that we’ve assigned a name. We’re not really fighting anything in Afghanistan, the real war is an attempt to totally remake an entire people from being tribal and backwards to a society that is progressive (holding Western values in regard to personal freedoms, political systems and etc) and unified in its support the underlying concept of the state.
Given that context it’s obvious why Afghanistan is pretty much never really going to go very well. It’s easy to kill a bunch of insurgents, it takes generations to effect the changes we want to see in Afghanistan.
As I’ve been saying since at least 2006 or so, the time has come to abandon Afghanistan to its own devices. We can use drones to blow up any training camps or such that might harbor Al-Qaeda or similar types that would be prone to flying planes into our buildings.
We just can’t be responsible for changing the fundamental nature of Afghanistan, they have to do that themselves. The simple truth is it takes time for societies to modernize, and throwing money at it doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet.
The Taliban have no reason to even want to do a Tet offensive. If they are even vaguely aware of American attitudes on the war then they’ll realize that most Americans don’t care much at all about Afghanistan (a huge difference in attitude compared to the Vietnam war), and most of our politicians that are in power seem to be advocated we leave the country in a moderately short time frame. If the writing is on the wall for us leaving, why do anything to risk getting a ton of your organization wiped out? All the Taliban has to do is hang on for a few more years and we’ll be gone. Then they’ll control a part of Afghanistan and most likely a bunch of other warlords will control other parts, basically a return to what Afghanistan has known for centuries.