American military in afghanistan

[Anomalocaris]

Yeah but should they have been there at all?

No, although people forget that Afghanistan was actually a NATO led operation, so there wouldn't have been much choice anyway.

NATO was there at the behest of the United States, at a time when the notion of a relatively honest and publically minded character of American international leadership was actually thought to have been a believable proposition, not a rip roaring punch line.

As to whether the US should have been there at all, the answer depended on whether the US was led by a neoconservative administration. At the beginning of American intervention in Afghanistan, the US enjoyed almost universal international support thanks to the bad name of the Taliban and the indisputed link between Taliban, al queda and 9-11. Initial progress of American occupation showed the US was well on its way to quickly smashing al queda, capturing or killing bin laden, and shattering the Taliban. It this had been America's main objective, it would undoubtedly have succeeded admirably to universal applause. This probably would have been America's main objective if Clinton, Obama, or another democrats, even carter, had been in the office.

But it was the bush administration and it's neoconservative overreaching cronies. To them 9-11 was but an opportunity to implement a grandiose agenda to perpetuate American hegemony in the middle east. Afghanistan was the goal, but part of a charade leading to Iraq. So the intervention in Afghanistan was not pursued to it logical, Md publically declared objective. Instead, we pissed them off, went off on a colossal 1 trillion dollar fool's errand in Iraq, and left resentment in Afghanistan to fester, and Taliban to adapt and plan and stew.

So. Should we have gone into Afghanistan in the aftermath if 911? Of course. It was logical, eminently doable, and would have enhanced our standing in the world even above the high water mark our international standing had been at at the end of Clinton administration.

But it was the bush administration. The rest is a lamentable tale of how a superpower, at the very zenith of its power and pride, could have been do undone by margins of A backward religious social system apparently in its death rattles.