Afghanistan's tribal, barbaric culture made for a nation building fail

The Taliban swept into Kabul over the weekend. (Getty Image/CNBC))

To the editor:

I do have some mixed feelings. I served 13 months in Iraq and 12 months in Afghanistan.

There are major differences with the two countries.

For Iraq, there was some sense of national unity as the country had excellent infrastructure, educated population, access to natural resources (water, oil, minerals, etc.), and a sense of a secular country with some tolerance to other religions other than Islam.

In Afghanistan, I found that was not the case in any way. It's very tribal and there is no national identity. For the United States, Afghanistan has no strategic value, where Iraq does. My opinion is that we should have stayed in Iraq and moved some of our bases in Europe to Iraq. They would have welcomed us as they fear Iran more than us.

It would have been a strategic win for a strong alley in that hostile region. For Afghanistan, once Bin Laden was killed, we should have declared victory and left. Billions of dollars wasted and it's hard to see both ISIS and the Taliban using captured US equipment for their security forces. I fear that most of the US population, our elected officials, and other government agencies believe we can quickly impose our values, work ethic, sense of fairness, treating women as equals, due process, etc. quickly on a foreign land where it has a very primitive and sometimes barbaric culture (i.e. Taliban and public stonings).

Let's hope we learn from this experience and really consider the secondary and third order effects of an occupation of another country. It's not an easy process and takes a lot of resources and hard, some unpopular decisions to make it work. Again, most of the U.S. population and elected officials do not understand the true cost of going to war.

- Dr. David A Yasenchock,

Rochester