Escaping the graveyard of empires
Full disclosure: I fully supported former president George W. Bush when, after the 9/11 attacks, he sent the military into Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime which had given aid and comfort to Osama bin Laden. If there is such a thing as a war of necessity, the Afghan War was it.
And we could have won that war. We could have paid our debt to Afghanistan and set it on a path to stability, after using it as a Cold War battleground in the 1980s, and then abandoning it to its own devices after the Soviet Union became the latest empire to see its fortunes dragged down in the Hindu Kush. There would have been no 9/11 had the West gone into Afghanistan after 1989 with aid and resources. (Much like there wouldn't have been a Vladimir Putin if the West had worked to rebuild wrecked societies in the Eastern Bloc, rather than gloating and taking a victory lap and prescribing harsh economic medicine to the defeated. Shades of Paris, 1919.)
If the US had focused on Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, that forlorn country could have been set on a path to normality and peace. But instead of finishing the job there, the Bush Administration turned its attention to Iraq, a country which was no threat to the US or its allies. We all know what happened next. Iraq became—and still is—a quagmire, riven by factionalism, with no end in sight. Afghanistan, starved of resources, fell into chaos again, but this time with US and NATO troops fighting a futile counterinsurgency. Futile, because brushfire wars in the middle of Asia are impossible to maintain. And if you turn your gaze elsewhere, thinking you can fix Afghanistan on the cheap, you're doomed to the failure of countless other would-be conquerors of the Pashtuns. The pointless Iraq War served only to again divide the American populace, as it came to question why we were in a war for, essentially, oil. The attacks of 9/11 came from caves in Afghanistan, not from the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad. And the lies which the Bush Administration gave out to justify the attack on Iraq served only to further sully the adventure. Meanwhile, Afghanistan became a failed state, again, and the Afghans again suffered from our lack of care.
Afghanistan won't do to the US what it did to the Soviet Union. It won't be the conflict which brings us down. This country is too powerful. And any threats arising from nonstate actors will be and have been monitored since 9/11. We owed a debt to the Afghans; not only did we not repay it, we enlarged it, through incompetence and simple neglect. These are people who were hoping that the world would finally turn its attention to their decades of suffering. Instead, the world, after a brief moment, disregarded them as always, on to the new shiny object which offered more bang for the buck. It reverted to a geopolitical backwater, with enough care paid to prevent it from going absolutely anarchic, but nothing more.
I agreed with going into Afghanistan, and I reluctantly agree with getting out. Any chance we had at rectifying a wrong we squandered. It probably won't come back to bite us; but the people we leave behind will now have to reap the whirlwind, after it was we who sowed the wind.