http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/world/asia/31history.html?_r=3&hp&;
http://documents.nytimes.com/a-different-kind-of-war#p=1

According to this 2009 NYT article, and its linked Official Army History of the Afghan conflict, the Afghanistan effort was hampered by neglect and half-measures from the very start. This can be forgiven as the result of trying to improvise a strategy on a moment's notice. But by the time Iraq was in the planning stages, little had been done to either come up with a more effective strategy, or to provide proper resources to prosecute the one that was finally implemented. Afghanistan simply didn't matter, and there were plenty of reasons to divert resources to expand the war into a new, potentially more profitable theater.

That early and undermanned effort to use counterinsurgency is one of several examples of how American forces, hamstrung by inadequate resources, missed opportunities to stabilize Afghanistan during the early years of the war, according to the history, “A Different Kind of War.”
This year, a resurgent Taliban prompted the current American commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, to warn that the war would be lost without an infusion of additional troops and a more aggressive approach to counterinsurgency. President Obama agreed, ordering the deployment of 30,000 more troops, which will bring the total American force to 100,000.

But as early as late 2003, the Army historians assert, “it should have become increasingly clear to officials at Centcom and D.O.D. that the coalition presence in Afghanistan did not provide enough resources” for proper counterinsurgency, the historians write, referring to the United States Central Command and the Department of Defense.
“A Different Kind of War,” which covers the period from October 2001 until September 2005, represents the first installment of the Army’s official history of the conflict. Written by a team of seven historians at the Army’s Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and based on open source material, it is scheduled to be published by spring.
...
But, once the Taliban fell, the Pentagon often seemed ill-prepared and slow-footed in shifting from a purely military mission to a largely peacekeeping and nation-building one, fresh details in the history indicate.
“Even after the capture of Kabul and Kandahar,” the historians write, “there was no major planning initiated to create long-term political, social and economic stability in Afghanistan. In fact, the message from senior D.O.D officials in Washington was for the U.S. military to avoid such efforts.”

It makes one wonder how far planning for a future Iraq invasion had already been underway.

Picking what was (in my opinion, at least) a wrong strategy was an understandable error, but then failing to follow up on it because another discretionary war was being planned is something else. Of course, an attempt to rewrite history to cover it all up is just par for the course for those committed at all costs to make excuses for their side in order to justify their domestic economic agenda. And we all saw how that turned out.