We already had this conversation, I think maybe even earlier in this thread...
I forget if you were a part of that convo but I'm thinking you were...
It's exactly as you've stated it.
It's in this thread because... a comparison was made between Afghanistan and Ukraine, by myself. Both involve a failure of US Intelligence to evaluate the "mood" of the population... per your comparison, the same as what happened in Vietnam. US Intelligence is consistently NOT evaluating mood: South Vietnamese = hated their President as a corrupt elite not interested in their welfare/ perfectly open to North Vietnamese leadership and, also, the overriding desire to expel ALL foreign forces, no matter the cost; North Vietnamese = a desire to expel ALL foreign forces, no matter the cost; Afghanistan = corrupt government, corrupt military, corrupt belief in themselves as a nation, a population with no actual desire to fight against the Taliban; Ukraine = complete misunderstanding of Ukrainian rage against Russia, going back at least as far as the Holodomor, and even previous to that their declaration of Independence in 1917 that was stamped out by the nascent Soviet Union in 1921, but also including the 2014 invasion...
The Ukrainians were going to fight tooth & nail against any Russian invasion. Did US Intelligence understand that?