[dccoolgai]

The root of it is this idea that war could be a "tool of liberation", looking backwards with rose-colored glasses at WWII. It was a brilliant compromise between neo-liberals (to whom the idea was very comforting) and the U.S. Military Industrial Complex (who has made trillions of dollars off of this flawed notion).

With all the money and resources spent in that country promoting something most of the people there never wanted, we probably could have been carbon neutral 3 or 4 times over.

We gave up so many of our freedoms at home - went collectively insane for two decades out of some abstract fear of "terrorism". The number of Americans _alone_ who died (and probably will die in the future) as a result of this miscalculation is a huge scalar multiple of the life and property lost on 9/11.

The Pax Americana that the post-Cold-War era promised is shattered. Even the one "silver lining": That this one poor little country would be a place where women would be more free and have a little better life... And maybe something good would come out of that. Even that is gone now.

I agree, it's just hard to salvage any kind of positive outcome from this - especially considering the huge opportunity costs.

[zozbot234]

> The root of it is this idea that war could be a "tool of liberation", looking backwards with rose-colored glasses at WWII.

You know, it's hard for war to be a "tool of liberation" if you do literally nothing to foster the basics of a free/liberal society in the places you went to war for. WWII is not a proper comparison at all; pre-WWII Europe did of course have a robust civil society, very much unlike Afghanistan. The thing about places like Afghanistan is that politicized religion is the closest they get to something even loosely comparable to what we'd call free/civil society in the West!

[SkyMarshal]

>out of some abstract fear of "terrorism".

To be fair, it wasn't abstract, though one could argue that particular attack was a one-off that could never be successfully repeated. But there were other concerns of dirty bombs, anthrax, etc. at the time.

That said, it's truly a shame that the US abandoned Afghanistan to invade Iraq. Afghanistan seemed to have potential for nation-building had we not diverted and diluted our efforts with Iraq.