I have to disagree. The US was not a conquering power. The US goal was to prevent terrorism aimed at the homeland. Unfortunately, our domestic politics does not run on catastrophes prevented. People who ask why we were there look at the last twenty years of relative safety from Islamic terrorists and see only our failure to make something happen in Afghanistan. That's foolish, because the mission was to make nothing happen here. That kind of mission is never finished. Your immune system cannot declare victory and go home. Nor can it just give up because it's tired.

One way to make Afghanistan less dangerous for us would have been to make Afghanistan a friendly nation. We were working on that, but it is at least a fifty year project. Social progress was being made under US auspices, but until a generation of educated women has reared a generation of fighting-age men, we cannot even begin to assess the result. Our departure simply represents our leaders' failure to recognize why we were there, what roll modernization played in that mission, and how long modernization takes to achieve. They were not too prideful; they were too stupid.