I think you are right to a large extent.
There are many issues coming to a head in Afghanistan. I personally believe that they all stem from the strategy of attempting to give the Afghans something they didn't want by military means.
By this I mean that I think we, the west, went into Afghanistan with a pipe dream of turning a tribal society into some form of democracy backed up by an inadequate amount of military hardware and no meaningful integration with other agencies/ resources who could give the Afghans what they actually wanted which was water, power, security and - to a degree - education.
I agree with Gen Jackson when he states that we should have had a rope, of which one thread was the military. Instead we went with a one string plan.
As for the enemy. Well we picked a fight with a bunch that don't need to win today or tomorrow but can sit it out and still be in the game long after western budgets have dried up, western stomachs have yet again turned over at the casualty count and western minds are more interested in the new i-phone than anything going on in Kabul.
Whilst the enemy is barbaric we haven't managed to alienate him from the population because for every beheading he does we slip up with a Koran burning, urination video or air-to-surface weapon that, despite our best efforts, has tragic consequences.
We have never put enough boots on the ground to truly hold it. We have never created the environment in which all the work that is needed can be achieved by unarmed agencies.
To cap it all we told the enemy when we were leaving, and I doubt very much they use powerpoint to brief but if they did they'd have a simple bar chart of 'blue-on-greens required until exit point'.
The really sad thing about this is of course the daily industry and heroism of our boys and girls, pan-coalition, which has never been in doubt and has never been anything other than humbling. I am sure that Afghanistan is, as a result of our combined efforts, a far better place than it was and that we have made a real difference. But that's not the same as 'winning' which I would define as 'ensuring it'll continue when we're gone'.