Jury's still out on that one. If we really wanted to decisively win the war in Afghanistan, we'd have bombed the smithereens out of Western Pakistan. That's where the Taliban and bin Laden are hanging out.
It's like that whole damn Parrot's Beak part of Cambodia that we wouldn't touch for so long. Nixon waited until public support for the war had evaporated before going in to Cambodia to cut off VC supply lines from the Ho Chi Minh trail. Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia was alternately playing China and the US like a violin, and only after he was deposed in a coup, did we do anything about that steaming pile of crap.
I guess Bush is waiting for muzzie terrorists to depose that blabbering idiot Musharraf before we finish the job.
We devastated the Taliban in Afghanistan and forced the remnants to flee into hiding elsewhere.
We won the war in Afghanistan to the same extent that we won the war in Iraq.
However, terrorists don't need vast armies. Strategically the war is won. The Taliban and Al Queda are beaten militarily. They can't defeat our forces, they cannot force their way back into power. If they did, we could crush them once again like we already have.
The only way for them to win now is for us to surrender to the relatively small groups of insurgents, most of whom are foreigners.
At the same time, the only way to have a reasonably stable victory is to cut off the funding for those insurgents and force the nations that are sponsoring these terrorists to stop.
We've gone from waging war to hunting terrorists. It's a matter of semantics as to if we have really won the wars in those two locations. The insurgents really only control territory if we allow them to do so while trying to get the new governments in those two nations to become more self sufficient. When we have given up on the domestic forces being able to handle it on their own, we have been able to quickly defeat the insurgent forces and uproot those we don't kill.
The problem is that we are never going to win the overall war on terror as long as we are unwilling to stomp out the major sponsors of it.
We are winning all the real battles. However, as long as we continue to tolerate the actions of Iran, Syria, and even Palestine, we will not have peace.
We could not win in Korea or Vietnam because our rules of engagement would not allow us to win. We were unwilling to go after those who were supporting and funding the fight against us.
Our enemies have learned how to defeat us, and it isn't on the battle field. All they have to do is make a quick victory impossible and prevent us from being willing to expand the conflict.
As soon as we invaded Iraq, liberals started predicting that Iraq would turn into a quagmire like Vietnam. However, they weren't simply predicting it, they were actively working to make it happen.