"Pious advocacy, and public support, for humanitarian military intervention dissolves very quickly when Western soldiers — actual 19-year-olds with real families — start getting ripped to shreds by daisy-chain IEDs in endless efforts to fix other countries' dysfunctional politics."

"Trying to predict the long-term outcome of conflicts of the sort that have engulfed Iraq and Syria is a fool's game. While the conflicts in Syria and Iraq have dragged on for years, the complex religious wars in Europe they resemble lasted more than a century. Although the fall of Mosul and Aleppo would mark the boundary between one military phase of the conflict and another, the underlying politics of the conflict are still in a mess."

"...[W]e now know that the notion that regime change leads to a better democratic or a humanitarian outcome is decidedly false. From Iraq, where the West tried a heavy footprint strategy, to Libya, where it opted for a light one, the idea that Europe or the United States can actually execute democratic change by force has been exposed as a fallacy."

"Kunduz is potentially a game changer because it exposes the gap between the paper plan for the defense of Afghanistan and the reality on the ground, particularly in two key areas: first, the capability Afghan ground forces; and second, the credibility of their NATO back-up."

"Can the US 'degrade and ultimately destroy' the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or Isis, as President Barack Obama promised on Wednesday, without being drawn into another open-ended conflict?"