The Failure of State-Centric Counterterrorism: Misconception and Standardization in Post-2001 Afghanistan
The collapse of Kabul was no mere operational mishap; it was the final epitaph of a global security model crippled by doctrinal hubris. The failure of Mission Resolute Support is rooted in the Standardization Trap—the illusion that linear institutional models can be exported into contexts that inherently reject their ontology. Through systematic mirror imaging, the West mistook asymmetric resilience for pyramidal hierarchies, reducing strategy to a futile exercise in military technocracy. This profound intellectual blindness reveals a stubborn insistence on fighting the enemy one desires to face, while ignoring the one that actually exists.