[sudosysgen]

The USSR was actually fairly successful once they figured out that brute force was never going to work, and executed the crazy leader of the national government to replace him with a more moderate leader. Their puppet state survived over a year without Soviet support, until Yeltsin sanctioned them. That's something the US never managed to do, not even close, and it took them 9 years instead of 20. Likely if the USSR wasn't moribund the puppet government could have pulled through long enough to start a process of consolidation.

And that's despite massive and direct US support to the Mujahideen, which the US didn't have to worry about.

Afghanistan was a winnable war. The way to win the war was, from the outset, to build a strong state that is fairly self-sufficient and motivated to defend itself, without too much corruption. The US military wasn't able to do that. At every turn they were ineffective in rooting out corruption and moral decay, didn't have anywhere near a workable vision for a path out of the Afghan disaster, and lacked the ability to implement a stable political system.

I agree that the US isn't geared towards massive troop deployments. That's why it's absurd to trot out troop numbers as the person I was replying to did.