Never a good fit. Ackerman summarizes an internal Pentagon report which finds that "U.S. troops didn’t understand the basic realities of society, culture and power structures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and couldn’t explain what they were doing to skeptical populations":
The study is designed to help shape the military of the 2020s — which could accordingly see a greater emphasis on both local knowledge of foreign hotspots and, well, spin. For the most part, the study is agnostic on the wisdom of the wars. That’s understandable, since the military is supposed to consider the merits of a given war beyond its purview. But the study contains not-so-oblique references to unrealistic strategy that made success difficult. “In operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere,” the report reads, “a failure to recognize, acknowledge and accurately define the operational environment led to a mismatch between forces, capabilities, missions and goals.” The report considers that less a strategy failure than an intelligence failure, and it doesn’t point fingers at anyone outside of the military. But the military’s intelligence structure, once in Iraq and Afghanistan, was entirely focused on discovering and locating its enemies, which left it blind to the experiences of the local population, which nourished them.
The Dish 