This OP can only be written by a huge tool of partisan politics... There was NO CHOICE but to go into Afghanistan after 9/11... Cleaning up the remnants of Al Queda there... Deposing the Taliban for making the bad choice of allowing that group to train and shelter there.
Bush should have agreed OBL be handed over to a third country to be tried. The CIA could still have hunted him down if they wouldn't have hanged him. No one would have objected seriously had some al Qaeda training camps been reduced to rubble. After that horrible crime on 9/11, basically the whole world would have stood behind the U.S. of A., and behind pretty much every intelligent effort at eradicating AQ, and that depraved version of Islam would have suffered a devastating blow.
Instead, because "NO CHOICE", there's 20 years of war, and the end result, except for a six-figure body count in Afghanistan alone (not to mention Iraq), looks desperately as if Afghanistan is about to get what was there before, the Taliban taking over, town by town, province by province, and two decades wasted.
Yeah, "NO CHOICE". Frankly, Flac, I sort of, kind of, understand in a moment of grief and rage imbecilic decisions are being made, namely, what should largely have been a police- and intelligence-driven operation was declared a war, and conducted as a war. Stupid, stupid, and interminably stupid. The effects of that stupidity we get to observe these days in the form of complete failure. Still, the CIA had to hunt down OBL, had to hunt down his henchmen, and the deposed Taliban will take over completely when, at long last, the U.S. slinks out of town.
What I do not, cannot understand is that same pap repeated on here, on this day, that led into the tragedy of Afghanistan, with almost two decades' worth of distance to the original event that entailed it. Is learning something from this utter failure due to nothing so much as imperial arrogance and stupidity really not a option?
BTW, if Trump actually gets the U.S. out of Afghanistan, I will, for once, for the first time, laud him for doing the right thing (albeit probably for all the wrong reasons).