I spent twenty-five years in the U.S. Army—as an enlisted infantryman and later as a Special Forces officer. I deployed to Afghanistan multiple times, watched friends bleed in its valleys, and stood on ridgelines where we built partnerships with Afghan units that, for a while, actually held. When the last American aircraft lifted off from Kabul in August 2021, I felt something I had rarely felt in uniform: shame. Not for the troops who executed a heartbreaking evacuation under fire, but for the strategic decision that put them there. The withdrawal was not merely messy; it was a self-inflicted wound that signaled to the world that America’s patience had run out.
For two decades we had invested blood and treasure in Afghanistan. By the final years of our presence, the mission had evolved into something sustainable. U.S. combat casualties had fallen to near zero. The Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, flawed as they were, were doing the bulk of the fighting. A small, professional advisory footprint—perhaps a few thousand trainers, special operators, and intelligence personnel—could have maintained a strategic airfield at Bagram, preserved a deep human-intelligence network spanning Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, and kept al-Qaeda and ISIS-K on the defensive. The Afghan Government and National Army still needed “training wheels,” but the country was no longer a launchpad for global jihad. We were on the cusp of a light-footprint success story, the kind that great powers have sustained elsewhere when the strategic stakes justified it. Instead, we chose convenience over stewardship.
I do not write this to relitigate the wisdom of ending a twenty-year war—let alone debate whether a declaration of “over” by the United States truly represents the end to a war. Reasonable people can disagree about the costs of staying. What troubles me is the method. The abrupt nature of the exit—abandoning Bagram Air Base in the dead of night, leaving billions in equipment, and watching a friendly government collapse in days—projected something more dangerous than fatigue. It projected irresolution. Adversaries study these signals.
Within months, the world stage shifted. Russia, which had watched the chaotic departure with undisguised interest, invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Whether the Afghan withdrawal was the sole cause is debatable; Vladimir Putin had nursed grievances over Ukraine for years. Yet the timing and the optics mattered. A United States that appeared unwilling to sustain a manageable presence in Central Asia looked less likely to impose meaningful costs elsewhere. Sanctions came eventually, but only after the invasion had begun. The message was received.
The ripple continued. Iran, long the patron of proxy militias, appeared to calculate that American credibility was at a low ebb. Intelligence reporting and open-source analysis have documented Tehran’s deepening ties with Hamas in the months leading up to October 7th. While Hamas retained operational autonomy, Iranian support—funding, training, weapons—provided the backbone. The scale and sophistication of the assault on Israel suggested emboldenment born, at least in part, from a perception that Washington was distracted and retreating. A power vacuum does not create aggressors, but it invites them to test boundaries.
Then came the irony: from perceived inaction came decisive action.
What began as an Israeli response to unimaginable savagery on October 7th evolved into something larger. Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza, followed by its decisive operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2024, and then its direct strikes on Iranian targets, systematically dismantled layers of Tehran’s conventional strength. Iranian air-defense systems—many of them Chinese and Russian-supplied—were degraded or destroyed. Missile production facilities and drone factories took heavy hits. Proxy networks that had given Iran strategic depth across the region were attrited.
These actions created a window that the United States, under new leadership and renewed strategic focus, chose to exploit. In June 2025, U.S. forces conducted precision strikes on key Iranian nuclear sites—Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan—using capabilities designed for deeply buried targets. Then, in late February 2026, came Operation Epic Fury: a coordinated U.S.-Israeli air and naval campaign that struck Iranian leadership, ballistic-missile infrastructure, remaining air defenses, and military command nodes. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening hours. The measurable pillars of Iranian national power—nuclear latency, long-range strike capability, and the ability to project force through proxies—were severely damaged in a matter of weeks. Its navy lay at the bottom of the sea. Its economy is now in a death spiral.
From a Western military perspective, it was a striking success. Iran’s nuclear breakout timeline, once measured in weeks, was pushed back by years. Its missile and drone arsenals, painstakingly built over decades, lay in ruins. The regime’s ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz or arm its regional militias was sharply curtailed. A fragile ceasefire took hold in early April 2026 and, as of mid-to-late-May, continues to hold—precarious, monitored, but holding.
Yet here we stand, once again, confronting the same question we faced after the lightning victories of 2001 in Afghanistan.
In late 2001, U.S. and Northern Alliance forces achieved what looked like an instantaneous triumph. Al-Qaeda’s safe havens were shattered. The Taliban were driven from every major city. The regime that had sheltered the architects of 9/11 appeared broken. Yet that swift unconventional warfare success gave way to a twenty-year counterinsurgency, a grinding nation-building effort, and ultimately a withdrawal that came when our collective patience had finally run out.
Today, with Iran, we have achieved a parallel kind of measurable victory. The physical infrastructure of its nuclear program, its missile forces, and its air defenses have been gutted. Senior leadership has been decapitated. The regime’s conventional power-projection capability—the part that could be seen on satellite imagery and targeted by precision munitions—has been rolled back.
But the deeper question remains unanswered, just as it did in the Hindu Kush two decades ago: Will these blows finally break the revolutionary ideology that has animated Iran’s theocratic leadership for nearly five decades, or will it adapt and endure? Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still command the levers of state power while the Basij paramilitaries and local shuras ensure local compliance. The regime has shown a remarkable capacity for reconstitution, even under sanctions and military pressure. Protests flare, but they have not yet coalesced into regime-ending momentum. The ideology of resistance—anti-Western, anti-Israel, rooted in a narrative of divine mandate and historical grievance—does not reside in a centrifuge or a missile silo. It lives in the madrasas, the barracks of the Basij, and the minds of a generation raised on it.
History reminds us that defeating an idea demands more than precision strikes, leadership decapitation, and economic collapse. It requires strategic patience, credible long-term commitment, and a clear-eyed recognition that the true source of an adversary’s strength is rarely found only on a target list. We learned this the hard way in Afghanistan. We dismantled the Taliban’s conventional forces in weeks, yet the movement returned stronger twenty years later because its ideology had never been defeated.
The same risk exists with Iran. The current ceasefire and ongoing negotiations are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Even if devastating kinetic action resumes, it remains far from clear whether military strikes alone—or even when combined with sustained diplomatic and economic pressure—can ultimately defeat a revolutionary ideology that now appears more deeply entrenched and determined than it has been in decades. We also risk doing too little: declaring the fight “over” from the American perspective while leaving that ideology in place, emboldened and ready to continue the struggle into the next decade and beyond. That ideology has shown a remarkable capacity to reconstitute faster and stronger whenever American commitment wavers. A lasting outcome will therefore require the strategic patience we lacked in Afghanistan, along with credible long-term commitment and a consistent deterrent presence in the region—perhaps through forward-deployed forces, security partnerships with Gulf states and Israel, and a robust intelligence posture.
I offer these reflections not as a partisan critique but as a soldier’s realism. I have seen what swift victories look like on the battlefield and what patient, unglamorous presence can achieve over time. I have also seen what happens when we declare victory and walk away before the ideological fight is won. The United States does not need to become the world’s policeman, but we must understand that great-power competition is not a series of decisive battles followed by permanent exits. It is a long game.
As this fragile ceasefire in the Gulf holds—even as the strong possibility of resumed strikes lingers—and the path forward with Iran remains uncertain, the lesson from the mountains of Afghanistan endures. Real victory is measured not by how quickly we can destroy an enemy’s capabilities, but by whether we can outlast their will. The measurable pillars of Iranian power have been toppled. The question now is whether we—and our allies—possess the patience to ensure the ideology that built them does not rise again.
Stephen D. Cook is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel with 25 years of service. A combat veteran decorated for both heroism and valor, he is the author of the field manuals Plan Like a Green Beret and Choose the Heavier Ruck, and the techno-thriller In the Shadows of the Sky. His work explores the intersection of elite military decision-making, intuition, and disruptive leadership. He is based in St. Augustine, Florida.
