[fixermark]

> and Afghanistan is hardly a country to begin with, neither country has ever posed a military threat to the USA.

I hate to call out the elephant in the room, but there are about 9,000 people who might disagree with you---3,000 we'd have to assume, because they are dead.

Nation-states don't have the excuse of "We're barely a country" when their territory can be used to launch an asymmetric attack by private terrorists on another nation. At best, that's an abrogation of responsibility. Since the Taliban was in charge at the time, I'd call 'abrogation of responsibility' way, way too charitable an interpretation.

[repolfx]

9/11 was not a military attack, it was a terrorist attack, and terrorism is a law enforcement problem. As evidenced by the fact that the USA has been killing 'terrorists' in Afghanistan and Pakistan for nearly 20 years now and yet there are still regular Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe.

[fixermark]

The policing and prevention of terrorist attacks on a nation's home soil is a law enforcement problem.

Law enforcement can't handle international issues when the originating nation doesn't have cooperative domestic law enforcement. At that point, the issue where attacks on a nation's home soil are being coordinated in the territory of an unresponsive or hostile foreign government becomes a military calculation.

The military is a ham-fisted tool to replace the job of domestic law enforcement, but in circumstances where the alternative is "nothing," it's depressingly better than nothing.