$2 trillion seems low, that probably doesn’t include the embedded costs in the $700,000,000,000 annual offense budget
What did the Afghanistan war accomplish in your view?
What did we accomplish and what good came of the 2 trillion we spent?
I believe someone posted a link saying almost all the money went to weapons manufacturers
Ended the Al-Qaeda threat as an international terrorism organization and kept the Taliban out of power for 20 years.
Iron is a time traveler from 2004.
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Requiring other protests to be as big as the largest anti war demo in history seems an excessively high bar.
Didn’t the US presence in Afghanistan (and admittedly Iraq) inspire a huge majority of terrorist acts since?
This is going to need some evidence.
Today, the full list of actors the U.S. military is fighting or believes itself authorized to fight under the 2001 AUMF is classified and therefore a secret unknown to the American public.[5]
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This is from the BBC last year, and it hardly sounds like the threat of al Qaeda has ended. This article says they are “diminished” whatever that means, but that they are still a significant presence.
Well sure if you’re just going to cherry-pick our foreign adventure failures like that. 
Are we just going to ignore Grenada?
Troops present /= fighting. There have never been US ground troops in Yemen, the last drone strike listed in Libya was 2 years ago,less than a dozen US deaths in Syria years ago, etc.
I’ll be impressed if they resume large scale attacks like Nairobi.
They just moved to Iran. Time to go in!
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I think we’re gonna be good on regime change for the next 5-10 years. Then everything old will be new again and we’ll be going in somewhere.
Good thing Biden won.
"Al-Qaida is present in “at least 15 Afghan provinces … and, according to Member States, Al-Qaida maintains contact with the Taliban but has minimized overt communications with Taliban leadership in an effort to “lay low” and not jeopardize the Taliban’s diplomatic position…”
From the UN Monitoring Team’s June 2021 report to the Security Council.
Isn’t Trump basically the only person that has claimed to eliminate Al Qaeda?
Lol, on what is this opinion based? Are you in military intelligence?
This conversation suddenly triggered a memory and Brandywine’s War popped into my head. It’s a novel about Vietnam I read like 40 years ago. I’ve searched for it several times but could never find it because I couldn’t remember the title. I’m sure this is the book because
Thanks, iron!