In one of his interviews before the Taliban walkover, John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, blamed the American failure in Afghanistan on a change in Washington’s mission from anti-terrorism to “nation-building.” In his view, after the US invasion in 2001, Washington should just have held strategic sites in the country to keep terrorists off balance and not engage in an ambitious reconstruction of Afghan society.īolton, one of the hardline conservatives who served as a high-level official in the George W.
