Counterinsurgency is not a cure-all. Local allegiances will always trump the might of the invader. Washington’s insistence that the troops turn Kabul into a functioning democracy will only erode the military's fighting spirit.
Rather surprisingly, William Odom's Collapse of the Soviet Military provides the most comprehensive and serious examination to date of the Soviet military's unexpected passivity during the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Ernest Gellner's Conditions of Liberty is the best treatment of civil society to emerge from a post-Cold War perspective. Gellner himself these days is in Prague much of the time, studying the process of regeneration from the inside.
