After the Taliban was beaten back into a few enclaves during that first year, the US should have made a deal with the rest of Afghanistan that every year we'd buy at a fixed price all the heroin they could produce, arm everyone in the country with nice cheap AK47s off the open market, and then work on the Taliban's cash sources and arms sources. Then knock off the Iranian mullahcracy, same deal, and come home.
True. In 2003 instead of iraq, the USA should have gone into Pakistan, eliminating bin laden and Pakistani nukes. No invasion of iraq, no Islamic state