Is Kabul the New Baghdad?

I got a message from an old friend the other day – he and his wife had recently moved from Kabul to Baghdad. He’d seen some recent angst of mine on Facebook, and sought to reassure me: “Stay where you are!” he wrote. “It’s much better there than here. Our movements are much more restricted here, and we have almost no contact with out local counterparts.”

Hold on just a second – isn’t Iraq the war we have already won? Leave aside for the moment the unpalatable fact that it would hard to picture a U.S. Embassy type with less contact than the sad souls I see “inside the wire” at Fortress Kabul.

But Iraq is the success story, no? We came, we saw, we conquered, and left a country with a developing democracy, free and fair elections, and a functioning government. Of course it took them eight months to form that government, and they needed the help of Moqtada al-Sadr, Iraq’s version of Mullah Omar, in order to do it.

So why are U.S. diplomats still cowering inside the Green Zone? Has the narrative of success in Iraq been just a tad overstated? And, the real question for me, as I read the glowing reports of Taliban “routed” in the south and “cleared” out of the east, does the same fate await Afghanistan?