Eight months into Operation Epic Fury, the White House continues to promise a swift conclusion to the conflict. We have seen this playbook before: Washington degrades Iranian military capabilities through intense airstrikes, tightens economic sanctions, and then waits for a battered regime to petition for peace. Yet Tehran’s theocracy is absorbing these material losses while keeping an iron grip on power. U.S. strategists are ignoring a glaring parallel: our own failure in Afghanistan.

Long before their 2021 return to power, the Taliban cultivated a functional shadow government, guerrilla cells, and an underground intelligence apparatus. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence provided the critical sanctuary and logistics to sustain them, supplemented by arms and intelligence support from Russia and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force. While the United States propped up the Afghan government with a substantial force presence, Washington fatally underestimated both the Taliban's deep local insurgent roots and the durability of their ideology. When U.S. diplomats negotiated from a perceived position of strength, they secured an agreement that evaporated the moment American troops withdrew. Because Washington left no sustained ground counterweight, the insurgent structures American forces failed to dismantle simply took over.