Consider: Infant mortality dropped by half during the U.S. operation. Life expectancy improved by six years. Electricity consumption, a key quality of life indicator, increased by a factor of 10. Years in school increased by at least three years for men and four for women. University graduates rose from under 31,000 to almost 200,000. (Those and other indicators are available at the Brookings Afghanistan index.)
Those gains would count for less if they had come at a major strategic cost—as was the case in Iraq, where the deposition of Saddam Hussein cleared a path for Iran’s domination of the region. But none of the people I spoke to for this article cited any comparable strategic cost in Afghanistan. No American adversary was strengthened; to the contrary, ambitions of rivals like Iran, Pakistan, China, and Russia were blocked. No allies were alienated; to the contrary, four dozen countries had joined the campaign by 2014, and 36 countries, from Albania to Ukraine, were still contributing forces as of February, according to NATO. If anything, the operation strengthened NATO and America’s alliances. “It was remarkable how much the NATO coalition held throughout this thing,” O’Hanlon said.
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