What I think everybody has lost site of is that Afghanistan, pre 9-11, was a country that facilitated an environment that allowed people who would normally be local village thugs to turn into James Bond villains that rammed airliners into buildings on the other side of the planet killing thousands of civilians drinking their morning lattes.

The Afghan war was most certainly not a war of colonial aggression or some bullshit diversionary war in the wrong country and nobody has floated any realistic options other than occupying the country as way to prevent more buildings from being knocked down. It's not even entirely clear that even that minimal goal has been accomplished.

The point of all this wasn't to spread Democracy to the oppressed people of Afghanistan and give them clean water and schools. It was to eradicate an environment that facilitates and encourages people to plan and execute complex operations intent on killing us as part of an insane world domination plan to bring forth a new Caliphate on this Earth in order to establish a particularly hard-line version of Islam on humanity.

It just so turns out that our best estimate of what will stop the festering insane world domination cancer that grows there is a nice dose of Democracy, schools and economic growth. Perhaps that's wrong and misguided, but I have yet to hear of a plan that doesn't include "better government and stronger economy" that has any chance of working. And you can't have those things without some semblance of security. And you can't have security against people who want to establish a global Caliphate through a plan of killing and terrorizing civilian populations without killing a few of those assholes in return.

I mean, what's the alternative? Go door to door and politely pass out flyers asking them nicely to stop having aspirations of killing the infidel to cleanse the world? I wonder how long the Peace Corps would last amongst people who's idea of a reasoned response to "let's drill a well for the village" is to cut their head off with a dull knife and send a video of the decapitation to their family.

I'm not sure I really understand how to have a productive debate concerning this issue with people who think that the proper response to 9-11 should have been a shrug of the shoulders and enhanced sanctions.

I don't think anybody wants us to be at war there -- the ass end of the Earth. It's not like we're getting any material benefit from it -- quite the contrary in fact. But I objectively think that anybody who holds naive ideals that you can execute an invasion, conduct security operations, stabilization initiatives and nation building in such an inhospitable, economically hopeless part of the world and not end up with dead civilians is a moron. And I most certainly haven't heard of a reasonable plan that would exclude such unfortunate casualties. Cries for NATO to get out are never followed by a plan for what to do after that that would prevent the social and economic degeneration of the country into what we had to deal with in the late 90's and early 2000s.

To be perfectly honest, nobody really cares if Afghanistan soft crashes into a fractured state of tribal warlords who kill far more civilians than any occupation force could ever hope to do. Afghanistan will never be an advanced industrialized society.

What we all care about is if they soft crash back into a regime that supports complex and grandiose terror operations outside their borders. And due to woeful mismanagement the entire conflict, it's not clear where they'd land, but it's not likely to be a peaceful agrarian society.