First, that's proven to not be true. We can engage them, but without winning the hearts and minds of the population the US will NEVER beat them back. The style of warfare in which the US engages can be likened to tearing the legs off a starfish. It creates a never-ending supply of Taliban-like forces.

The school issue is a bit more complicated. The kids do learn all they need to know to function in their society, the society they'd like to keep.

Obviously they don't know enough to function well in Chicago or Los Angeles, or San Jose. They don't want to be there, either. There's more to life for some people than spending a third of it in a cubicle.

Afghanistan is not a "nation" in the sense that Western nations are. It's an amalgamation of tribes, each with it's own territory who are very loosely affiliated in some ways. To expect it to behave like Canada, for instance, is to set them up for failure.

Their society has evolved to fit their socio-religious-geographic circumstances very well. They do need medical care and those practioners, but look at the infrastructure which is necessary to create a physician or nurse. They don't have even the rudiments of it, nor the economy to support one. The destruction of their chosen society can be measured by the number of McDonalds, each one being another nail in their pastoral life.

And stability is especially difficult when foreign invaders are raising havoc throughout the country, seemingly bombing at random assemblages of citizens, be it weddings, family reunions, etc. on the off chance someone who doesn't like the US may be there. Hard to have good schools in that atmosphere. And it gets harder to find someone who likes the US, too.

Arf