[ramblenode]

> and one of these value systems simply can't win certain types of war.

You are suggesting that it is the US's gentlemanly morals that puts it at such a disadvantage as to make "winning" impossible. But what is "winning" absent those values? More dead Taliban at the cost of more dead civilians? If that is "winning" for the US, it is almost certainly not "winning" for the Afghans who live in the country and would prefer to be alive.

But say you kill more Taliban while generally tolerating civilian casualties, then what? The US is no longer a force protecting Afghans from the Taliban, but a force bent on conquering the land of Afghanistan. The Taliban will increasingly look like liberators against a bloodthirsty invader whose raison d'etre for occupying the country is not the livelihood of Afghans but to install a puppet government. The Taliban will regrow, resupplied by the friends and family of civilian dead, and emboldened with a moral mandate.

The more you "win", the more enemies you create for tomorrow. At the strategic level, there is no winning, only various ways to lose more slowly. But eventually the outcome is the same, as it has been in all Western colonies. The difference is that in the old days, the goal was just to extract wealth from a place, not to reconstitute its population (though the French did try).