War on terror

Why the U.S. Military Isn’t Winning

In June 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria swept through Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, and drove out the Iraqi forces that the U.S. had spent $20 billion training and equipping. Last May, they did much the same in Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province. This week, the Taliban—the Islamic fundamentalists running Afghanistan who sheltered Osama bin Laden as his lieutenants plotted the 9/11 attacks—retook the northern Afghan city of Kunduz after the U.S. invested $60 billion building Afghanistan’s military. It marked the first time the Taliban have taken a provincial capital since 2001.