[protocolture]

Yes but if you spend some billions of dollars to replace the Taliban with the Taliban, you have only demonstrated that you are willing to make your own citizens suffer with diminished resources for no outcome.

>If you're walking home from work and some person tries to mug you, even if they are unsuccessful, that will permanently change your behavior as if they had successfully robbed you anyway. Maybe you'll change your route. Maybe you won't walk and drive instead.

In global politics, this tends to make you want to increase your defenses so it doesn't happen again, and find local partners for that defense. This usually comes at the cost of US influence, not its increase.

Like Iran is looking at its current situation and going "The literal only deterrence we could have to prevent this is to develop a nuclear capability. The US cannot be trusted to deal with, and it is pointless to try."

A nuclear Iran can now only be avoided by scorched earth. Scorched earth will now just cause an already partly US hating population to hate them more and create matyrs. Theres no possible upside to this conflict.

[roncesvalles]

With Afghanistan, I think people fixate on the fact that the Taliban is still there and while that's true, Al Qaeda has completely been wiped out (except fringe groups that have adopted the name) and OBL, the person most responsible for 9/11, was successfully killed by an attack launched out of Afghanistan. The current Taliban and whatever terrorist groups remain in that region no longer have an interest in hurting the US directly. The current Taliban is also very different from the one in 2001, almost geopolitically flipped in some ways (allied with India instead of Pakistan, and almost certainly responsible for majorly disrupting China's OBOR project in that region, another win for the US.

Not to mention, 20 years of no Taliban. An entire generation of Afghans grew up without being under a Taliban government.