IMHO, President Bush looked at Afghanistan, ‘The Graveyard of Empires’, and saw it as a no win situation. He instead picked a fight with the terrorists on ground of our choosing. Iraq is flat, open and fairly modern. He got the terrorists to come to where we could kill them and we did. He left just enough men in Afghanistan to keep the Taliban out of power and only made a show of trying to nation build.
Candidate Obama made all the noise about Afghanistan being the ‘good war’ and ‘Bush took his eye off the ball’. He committed us to a mission that Bush never supported. There have been more coalition forces killed in the 21 months since Obama was elected than in the entire 7 years Bush was in charge and we are no closer to a creating a stable ally than we were in October 2001.