Who do i feel sorriest for?
1. The American troops. Particularly those who had any fighting time in Afghanistan.
They never were given all the means needed to totally annihilate the Taliban in the first place, which would have required to conduct ourselves in the Afghan-Pakistan region as we did in WWII, where no targets were off limits and no resoucres were denied to our troops - total war for total victory. However, I understand the American public post-911 were not going to get behind such an effort, so all measures our troops could employ were just half measures meant to “contain” the Taliban.
2. Those in Afghanistan who truly wanted a different Afghanistan and yet were usually out maneuvered by their own Taliban countrymen. You saw some thwousands of them trying to get a hold of an American aircraft taking off on a runway at the Kabul airport.
Our only route to supply our troops in Afghanistan went through Pakistan, which meant we either had to keep the Paks happy, or go to war with them too.