US Army Retired Lt. Col. Daniel Davis said he was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010, “when there were 140,000 U.S. and NATO troops.” He said he saw “firsthand that the insurgent and terrorist fighters cannot be militarily defeated.”

“Short of a return of major deployments of tens of thousands of U.S. combat troops, this is not a winnable war,” Davis told VOA.

“No matter what the president said, this war flatly cannot be won militarily. To set a strategy dependent on militarily defeating the enemy is going to fail, just as surely as all other attempts have over the past 16 years.”