On August 18, Robert Manning published an op-ed in The Hill entitled “After hubris and humiliation in Afghanistan, will humility follow?”
Manning highlighted that, for the United States, there are “a surfeit of lessons to be learned — lessons about misjudging basic requirements of counter-insurgency; about the perils of mission creep and imposing US notions of nation-building ill-fitting to Afghan culture, history and politics; about using military approaches to what ultimately are political problems; about self-deception fueled by bureaucratic inertia; and not least, about the hubris involved in not understanding the limits of U.S. power.”