Graeme Smith's writings have been discussed before here on Army.ca; he used to cover Afghanistan for the Globe and Mail ... but he rarely covered the CF in Afghanistan.
The "meme" against which Sean Maloney railed is that we must, with hindsight, see Afghanistan as another Vietnam ... another "defeat" caused by a poor strategy, another "domino"* which has fallen to a crafty enemy.
Although, as anyone who follows my ramblings here knows, I'm no fan of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, I think he (probably John Manley, actually) got our objectives almost exactly right back in 2002/03. They were, essentially, self serving: 1 to do, and (even more important to be seen to be doing) our full and (more than) fair share in the UN mandated fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan; 2 to defend ourselves against an explicit threat from Osama bin Laden by weakening, at least, al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and 3 to help the Afghan people out of the cycle of poverty, bad governance, etc which made the Taliban's success so easy.
As long as we focused on the first two ~ which, in my estimation, were accomplished by about mid 2007, I think we had it right. We did do some, perhaps even more than sensible people should have expected, about the third aim but most people's goals were unrealistic.
As far as I am concerned we, Canada, anyway, "won" in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is out, we made a major contribution to denying al Qaeda it's own national base in Afghanistan. It is now reduced to fighting over black African backwaters. We "grew" in stature in the world by demonstrating our will and ability to make a significant "hard power" contribution to global peacemaking ~ once again, we "punched above our weight" as so many used to say about us in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. We did make some positive contributions to the lives of ordinary Afghans, some of those contributions will take time to be felt, some will be rolled back, some were and will be "stolen" by our allies.
What did we do wrong? We stayed after 2008, when it should have been obvious ~ but wasn't, yet, to me ~ that ISAF and the US led mission had lost its way.
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* The domino theory was popular, it was a (but not the) foundation stone of American strategy, in the 1950s and '60s. Both Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy embraced it, the latter, perhaps, more than the former. It was, I think, the brainchild of the Dulles brothers: John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower's Secretary of State and Allen Dulles headed the CIA. But perhaps it's most fervent advocate was McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's foreign policy guru.
