From a US military perspective, this is actually perfectly in line with standard procedure. Holding ground, especially ground so far away, is costly and difficult. So the new strategy these last 15 years has just been to destroy civic infrastructure and collapse the state. It removes a country's ability to resist resource extraction, it creates a long-term "frontier" combat zone that's highly profitable for arms companies, and it serves as a petri dish for incubating new proxy forces to be used later, either as goons or scapegoats (or both).