[lostalex]

It definitely wasn't a mistake to invade Afghanistan, 9/11 was an act of war, and it was perpetrated from Afghanistan. it was a huge mistake to stay and try to help them though. We should have bombed them back to the stone age after 9/11 (and frankly it wouldn't take many bombs to do that because the middle east isn't much more evolved than the stone age to begin with) and left. The mistake was sticking around and spending billions of dollars on reconstruction and sacrificing thousands of American lives and thinking that we could help them start acting like a civilized country.

We thought it could be like Japan after Pearl Harbor. We get attacked, we fight back, we win, and then we could help them get back on their feet, just like we did with Japan and Germany after ww2. The difference of course is that Japan and Germany were both civilized sophisticated countries before the war. Afghanistan has never been a civilized or sophisticated country.