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[Now 14 months away from having soldiers die in Afghanistan who weren’t even born yet on 9/11.]

Not a real surprise. Guerrilla wars can last centuries. In the US alone, Europeans fought Indians for almost 400 years before the last bitter-enders finally gave up in 1923. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars#Last_conflicts The war in Afghanistan will be way shorter, because the Taliban will eventually run out of money, whereas Uncle Sam never will. At $10b a year, including civilian aid, the dollars involved there are negligible, as wars go, relative to the US’s annual output.

Would I prefer it if we had nuked Afghanistan out of existence? Sure. But Bush would have been prosecuted as a war criminal and spent the rest of his years in prison. So I understand why he never considered it. The war in Afghanistan is our way of convincing criminal organizations like al Qaeda and the Taliban that the US will never stop killing them if they conduct a large scale massacre of Americans on the scale of 9/11.

In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, we lost 400,000 Americans fighting the Nazis and the Japanese. That’s almost 300 dead GI’s a day for almost 4 years. So far in the war against the Taliban, we’ve lost less than 2,500 Americans. http://icasualties.org/oef/ People say “never forget” re 9/11. One way of doing so is to keep on appropriating funds to fight the Taliban.