Afghani War
Biden has announced American troops along with remaining NATO troops will be withdrawing from Afghanistan by 11 September 2021. This is in consultation with all involved NATO nations. Previously, Trump wanted American troops out by the middle of May, but this would not have given time for the NATO troops to complete their withdrawal, as I understand it.
I hope we just don't have to go in again down the road.
I hope we just don't have to go in again down the road.

Comments
I always thought "a land war in Asia" in that admonition meant "somewhere in the vicinity of Vietnam".
Because if it literally means "the Asian continent", I'm not sure what the connecting factor would be between all those nations. Topographically and culturally, there really is no such thing as "Asia".
According to what I've just been reading, it seems like an apocryphal phrase, attributed to various military figures. The same source said it was popularized by The Princess Bride in 1987, but I know I've seen at least one reference to it from the late 60s/early 70s(in National Lampoon, so meant humourously).
I remember my dad telling me in the early 80s that you should never fight a war in the jungle(by which he meant Vietnam), or against religious people(by which he meant Afghanistan).
If I had to make a connection it would be territory size and overextended supply lines, but even that's not quite right for the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Well, Napoleon and Hitler ran into their trouble in the European part of Russia, if we're being technical. Though I suppose western Europeans probably viewed even the Russians west of the Urals as Asiatic mobs.
As for land size and supply lines, again those things depend on geography, which is far from uniform across Asia.
I know popular thinking tends to conflate the Korean War and the Vietnam War(yes, I'm looking at you MASH), but as a resident of Korea, I can tell you the climate and topography here is nothing like what I've heard about Vietnam. Just for starters, it snows, and there are no jungles.
Unrelated but parallel: the subsequent close ties of the Bush II gov't with Saddam Hussein (Iraq). Dick Cheney is a bad man on that. Halliburton, the oil contracting company Cheney is attached to did equally well before and after the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses and lies.
I think the "land war in Asia" thing has it's best reference in the movie "The Princess Bride". Except, apparently if there's oil it's thought of as a good idea.
As for the phrase itself: (from stackexchange.com,)
<quote>
"Never fight a land war in Asia" is one of those weird aphorisms that is widely known, but on which nobody agrees who originally said it. It has variously been attributed to Bernard Montgomery (British General), Dwight Eisenhower (American General and later President), and Douglas MacArthur (American General).
...
Getting involved in a land war in Asia is a classic blunder in the real world. Examples from before The Princess Bride include:
The Korean War
The Vietnam War
The Russian War in Afghanistan
All three were land wars in Asia that have been seen as mistakes. Grave mistakes. Epic blunders. Arguably the most famous classic blunders.
</quote>
But it's not clear what, if any, specifically "Asian" factors caused those wars to be epic blunders.
All the list really shows is three wars that happened in Asia, which one side lost. Well, in almost any war you can name, there's usually one side that loses. And Asia is a huge land mass, so odds are, some of those wars are gonna happen there.
The French lost Canada to the British in 1759. Then, Britain lost America to the colonists in the 1770s(we'll call 1812 a draw). Then, the CSA lost to the Union in 1865.
So...don't get involved in a land war in North America?
The traditional intelligence community response to a withdrawal from Afghanistan is that it will mean the Taliban will establish control of the country as a base for terrorist groups. Here is a NYT article discussing the withdrawal. The relevant point is:
The NYT reports the fears of the current Afghan Govt later in the article:
It seems to me that these are the core issues in terms of strategy. In terms of politics, withdrawing from Afghanistan is a no-brainer. Not only is it extremely popular across the political spectrum, but surely it will ease America's debt burden, allowing funds to be re-directed to other much-needed areas. That debt stuff is speculative on my part.
I have heard some commentary to the effect that in the face of the GOP's extremism, the Biden Administration is prioritising initiatives that have widespread public support: rolling out the Covid vaccine while not being heavy-handed on masks and lockdowns (the wrong settings, but what can they do?); big spending on infrastructure, and using the reconciliation process to include much needed Aged Care and School funding; sort of acting a bit on gun control; and now withdrawing from Afghanistan. The theory fits, ISTM.
The West did not start the Korean war, North Korea did. Should North Korea have just been able to take over South Korea ?
Speaking of the psychological effect on the invading force, remember the verse from Kipling:
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll up your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your gawd like a soldier.
In all three wars the invader seriously underestimated local commitment to defence and the lengths that they were willing to go in that cause.
Of your three North American examples, I think that the American Civil War can safely be ignored as a counter example, because by definition a civil war is fought on home territory. With the Pakistani civil war that birthed Bangladesh, there was no choice but to fight it somewhere in Asia, probably in Pakistan; the American Civil War had to be fought in North America. Of the other two wars you cite, neither was an invasion of North America, as France and the UK were already established (as were Russia, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark) in North America, and while there were First Nations allied with both the French and the British, the First Nations were not the specific target of the European powers in those wars, and to a considerable degree were pursuing their own interests within the context of a European-led world war.
Re Vietnam. The agreement to hand the country back to the French in 1945 and ignore the country's desire to be independent looks key in that fiasco. Terrible series of bad blunders.
Strategies where a country allies itself with another for selfish monetary or political reasons seems pretty evil when their gov'ts are terrible. It didn't go well in Iran/shah and one wonders about Saudi Arabia.
I think you are impermissibly lumping three very different conficts together, but I have real difficulty with treating the Korean war as the same as the other two. I think I see the Korean war through the prism of MASH, and that founds my gut rejection of the idea of a hostile Korean population. I'm open, as always, to being wrong.
I agree there are commonalities between all three of the Asian wars. I'm just not convinced that it's their "Asianness" that gives them those commonalities.
I suppose it might be the case that Asia was the place where these sorts of wars were likely to be fought in the first place, possibly due it being the scene of substantial decolonisation post-WW2 and/or nations bordering on larger nations regarded by the west as Cold War rivals.
US anti-communism was the main driver. Three million people died for democracy of one flavour or another.
You are deliberately confusing the bad experiences of individuals with the over all picture and please don't pretend that I have been dismissive
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/14/afghan-women-fear-the-return-of-the-taliban
So it seems to me that this is the sort of issue that you either solve 'properly' (whatever that means in terms of resources and so on) or leave well alone to start with. At present there are a few garrisoned cities and then the majority of country being subject to the odd patrol and constant threat of Predator strikes.
This has led to a constantly terrorized rural population, a tit for tat war of local chiefs informing on their rivals and the ISI threatening Pakistani tribesmen with drone attacks if they don't go over the border and fight the Americans.
I'm curious what you think currently happens to the women outside the very few areas in the country that the Americans permanently garrison? Or over the border in the tribal areas of Pakistan 'our ally' ?
The question is how do you fix it? How many of those men do you have to kill before the rest start behaving better?
I'd suggest a different historical prism from something filmed in the Californian countryside by CBS, which demonstrates that history doesn't repeat, neither does it rhyme, it's just a series baggy pants bad puns. Much as I admire some of Alan Alda'a work, he's not a historian. MASH was more about American sensibilities during the Vietnam War than it was about anything else. I don't think that I'm the one doing something historiographically 'impermissible' here.
It was @stetson who selected the example Asian wars, not I (supra). I was merely replying to him.
The Koreans are a proud people subjected to the tender mercies of Japanese colonialism (slaughter of demonstrators, slavery - both labour and sexual, de-korification, forced resettlement), super power partition, followed by a proxy war. I imagine that I'd be pretty hostile to anyone I didn't recognise from my village. If that doesn't jibe with a Hollywood 'understanding' of history, I'm quite comfortable with that.
Point of clarification: My quotation from Kipling was not a comment on Afghan culture or Afghan women, but on the colonialist/orientalist perception of the Asian other. But yes, it is a nasty context.
It was @stetson who selected the example Asian wars, not I (supra). I was merely replying to him.
For the record, I was replying to HarryCH's mention of the phrase about land wars in Asia.
The problem here is that "success" in the Afghanistan War is very tricky to define. Does it mean rooting out al Qæda from the country? If so, then mission accomplished! (For real this time.) Does it mean America's preferred government stays in power in Afghanistan in perpetuity? If so, that would seem to require perpetual military occupation, which leads to the question of whether this is a worthy enough goal to keep doing it forever.
I've long thought that this kind of thinking leads to two very distinct fallacies. The first is that in order to "succeed" (however defined) one has to be ruthless. The other is that if someone is being ruthless then they're sure to "succeed".
I'm not certain that we have go looking for an "Asianness", or where we'd go looking for it. As I argued above, the "Asianness" seems to have resided as much in the mind of the westerner perceiving Asia as it did anywhere. The genius Vizzini seems to have been thinking along the lines of Alexander or Xenophon as much as Korea or Vietnam. Kipling certainly had Alexander in mind (The Man Who Would Be King). I suppose that to a degree Germania or Scythia held a similar exoticism for the Romans, the Finnish interior for the mediaeval Swedes, Abyssinia and Prester John for scholastic culture; "Asianness" being a subspecies of a cultural otherness of the imagination (albeit a sometimes heavily armed imagination inflicting serious real world casualties).
I think we're in agreement. There is no "Asianness" that is a relevant factor in determining whether or not a particular war is a good idea. But the phrase "Never have a land war in Asia" presumes that there is such a quality, and that it can be examined for predictive purposes.
If I say "Never pet a dog that's foaming at the mouth", I would also be able to tell you what exactly it is about a dog foaming at the mouth that makes it dangerous: it's a symptom of rabies.
But the land-war-in-Asia thing is like saying "Never pet a dog with brown fur", because you can remember three times that you got bitten by a dog with brown fur. But that's a coincidence, not a pattern.
I was conceding that my view might be distorted because of MASH, not using it to dispute your assertion. I was looking for more detail about the attitude of Koreans to the war. I thought it might be a complex issue.
But I remembered how the improvement of the position of Afghan women was mentioned as a benefit at the beginning of the venture into Afghanistan, and had read the article about the way the women were now feeling, and felt that this had been utterly forgotten.
Your post was the only one which even approached half the population, and this gave me a way in.
British India, three times, the Russians, the present grinding and inconclusively unsuccessful conflict. I rest my case.
The Chinese intervened to save themselves from the Americans on their border.
The Americans had no plans to go into China