A very good friend of mine did a deployment over there. One of his succinct comments was that you can’t bomb them back into the stone age because most are already there.
I would like to think that we have people within our foreign service, intelligence and elsewhere that have spent a good portion of their careers studying the people and cultures of various places our leaders decided to send our troops into. One would endlessly hope they would be listened to as far as what may or may not work. Trying to set up systems of government in our image is doomed to failure if the people there do not support it.