You overestimate our ability to control events in Afghanistan. We really didn't want Karzai. He doesn't serve with our permission.
“The Taliban presided over a stable government so did Saddam.”
You have got to be kidding. Al Qaeda was operating in the power vacuum of a Taliban controlled territory. So was the Northern Alliance. Al Qaeda acted as a sovereign state in declaring war on us, punctuating it with, among other things, the events of September 11th, 2001 - though they were not one, only ensconced in another nominally sovereign state, Afghanistan, leading to the current mess.
Don’t mix Iraq in here with this: otherwise I’ll have to point to the stability of Qaddafi’s Libya, Mubarak’s Egypt, etc.
“You overestimate our ability to control events in Afghanistan. We really didn’t want Karzai. He doesn’t serve with our permission.”
See above in my previous post. My question there wasn’t just rhetorical. This conversation is basically over when you make an assertion, I then counter, and then you make the same assertion. We’re just in disagreement then, which I accept. I maintain that you’re wrong. You’re free to do the same. One of us is persisting in error. If it’s me, were I then to get the facts of the matter and change my mind, I’d be back here to admit to it. And I’d hope you’d do the same.