"Net" is partly from accounting where
we calculate, say, earnings, and have
already subtracted off expenses, etc.

More generally "net" means a summary
or a very simple statement of the
core point.

In writing to be understood, often it
is good be clear, and even too simple,
about the main 'points'. Otherwise
it is too easy that no 'points'
at all get across.

Your comment and at least two 'siblings'
are far more thoughtful than mine was
so that my oversimplifying with "net"
is not appropriate.

Back here in the US, after 9/11 and now
12 years in Afghanistan, we need to make
some difficult decisions: We tried, hard
but in total ('net'!) not hard enough, to
make Afghanistan a "shining city on a hill"
but apparently have failed and maybe even
'net' have done more harm than good.

Bin laden is gone. The Taliban government
that let Bin Laden use their country as
a base to attack the US is not gone but
is out of power. There are stories that
some even in the Taliban now understand
that it was a big mistake to let Bin
Laden use Afghanistan as a base to attack
the US.

The US has tried 'nation building' in
several countries of the world. We were
largely successful in Germany and Japan.
With US military protection, Taiwan and
South Korea have done well. The US has
tried hard to have peace with both
Russia and China and not have them become
another 'Axis' like Germany and Japan in
the 1940s. Still, in Viet Nam, Cambodia,
Iraq, and Afghanistan, the results of US
efforts been from frustrating and/or poor
(Iraq) down to worse.

Viet Nam is the grand tragedy: I have
a nice 600 dot per inch black and white
printer from Brother, made in Viet Nam.
Terrific for Viet Nam. The US couldn't
be happier. The Brother printer is much
better than the HP printer I bought in
1994. That Brother and Viet Nam are
at least in part beating HP in the printer
business is mostly fine in the US (except
for HP stockholders!). As far as I can
tell, what Viet Nam is now is just fine with
the US. The big, huge point for the US is
that Viet Nam is not part of some Axis
of Moscow, Peking, and Hanoi that seemed to
be a threat starting just after WWII where
the US had just defeated the Axis and didn't
like things that looked like an Axis. The
WWII Axis also hurt Viet Nam -- Japan occupied
Viet Nam.

But,
the way Viet Nam is today, it is clearly
no threat to its neighbors or the US, and
that's really all the US wanted. The
US didn't want a colony, and for the
rubber or lumber, wanted to pay fair prices
for it.

The tragedy
is that Viet Nam and US relations as they
are today could have been just the same in
the early 1970s, the 1960s, ..., back to
just after WWII (to heck with the French)
just by both sides just deciding to and
shaking hands on it.

In summary ('net'), the US has tried,
sometimes at great expense in US blood
and treasure, often with much more expense
in blood in the other country,
sometimes been successful,
and sometimes not. When we have failed,
we didn't really know why.

For why the US was successful in Germany
and Japan, both countries had very strong,
highly disciplined cultures, suffered just
devastating, horrible, defeats, with
homeless people wandering cold and hungry
in the streets with rotting bodies under
piles of rubble, and then used their
discipline to say "never again", mean it,
implement it, do a lot of really hard
work, and rebuild themselves.

So, 'culture' played a part. So, why
not success in Afghanistan? My view:
Culture. The culture was different;
either the US didn't understand it
or it was insufficient. What was that
culture? In a word, Islam; it runs
nearly everything. The US tried to build
a 'secular' (independent of religion)
democracy, and the Taliban have Islam
on their side. The US has B-52 bombers
from 40,000 feet, GPS location, A-10
airplanes that reduce tanks to piles of
scrap iron in seconds, supersonic F-16
airplanes that can reduce a tank to scattered
scrap iron in even less time, schools, hospitals,
etc. and lose, and the Taliban have sticks, stones,
some RPGs, and rusty AK-47s and win. To me,
the main difference is that
the Taliban have the 'culture', in this
case, Islam, on their side.

Whatever, likely the US will be leaving Afghanistan,
fairly soon.

For the US, it's much more difficult to attack
us now. In particular, it's difficult even to
have nail clippers on a US commercial airplane.
And I can believe that in many Islamic countries,
anyone shouting "Jihad! Death to ..." will quickly
get a 'corrective lesson' they won't forget, maybe
even can't forget.

For Turkey, if they become more fundamentally
Islamic, then they will find that the US,
NATO, the EU, and maybe even Russia will become
much less friendly.