And Bush made the mistake of listening to Colin Powell and tried that nation building crap in Afghanistan, twenty years of death and misery for nothing.
We should have killed bin laden, punished the taliban and any other terrorist we encountered and left that rat hole within months, a year at most.
Nobody disagrees with you about Bin Laden. We tried to kill bin Laden at Tora Bora.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Tora-Bora
The other part, I agree with you. Colin Powell’s idea that “if you break it, you have to fix it,” was wrong. Afghanistan wasn’t fixed when we arrived. It was broke a long time before we arrived. Maybe broke for thousands of years.
Plus, the neocons thought an election or maybe two turns people into (small d) democrats. No. It takes ma generation, maybe two for this to happen. Bush’s planning for Afghanistan and the Obama’s follow-through was a disaster. It took Trump to pull the plug on that disaster.
Bigger picture: People over-learned the lesson of nation-building of Japan and Germany. They don’t appreciate what a miracle Douglas MacArthur accomplished in Japan, for example. Continued dictatorship in South Korea and Taiwan is more normal than quick transformation into a democracy.
I’ll put this a different way: premature withdrawal can be very bad.