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That very clearly was not their definition of a victory condition from the start. Even your far more limited goal very clearly was not possible to do, and I think the evidence shows that the people in charge clearly knew it wasn't possible to do from fairly early on. Like, even if they could output something like the above as an abstract mission statement, there never were concrete variables in the real world to plug into those abstractions. The Taliban were the best chance by far for stability, there were no significant runners-up. Moreover, long before our involvement there ended, my understanding is that we ourselves were once more providing cash, arms and training to Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria.
I was following along when all this got rolling. I remember that the Taliban sent a last-minute offer to hand over Bin Laden just before the invasion kicked off, but Bush turned them down in favor of invasion. The reason, as I understand it from the events I observed, is that a large part of the theory and strategy behind the GWOT was that we could in fact engineer these Islamist theocracies and dictatorships into modern liberal democracies. That was never going to happen, hence all the lies told over the next twenty years to cover up the fact that it wasn't happening.
If you shoot first and ask questions later, you "create more terrorists", but you live. If you ask questions first and shoot later, you run a significant risk that they shoot you while you're trying to ask questions, and then recruit more terrorists anyway on the grounds that they're national heroes killing the hated infidel occupiers. Spare me the COIN cliches: I'm already quite familiar with them, and I observe that the people promulgating them have not actually delivered a victory to establish the reliability of their model. So if you kill 9 insurgents and one civilian... why are you confident that the 9 insurgents you killed aren't better recruitment material than the one civilian? Why are you confident that the harm those 9 inflicted before they were killed wasn't better recruitment material than the killing of the one civilian? Why are you confident, in short, that the problem was how the soldiers on the ground did things, and not the orders and policies those soldiers were dutifully carrying out?
Sure. This is war as soldiers prefer to wage it, prioritizing their own agency above all, as opposed to war as soldiers actually wage it, with strict discipline and execution of orders from those far away. One of the things I've pointed out before is the madness of our demonization of the idea of "just following orders". Humanity has spent literal millennia trying desperately to get soldiers to "just follow orders", and to their credit, everything I've seen indicates that in Afghanistan, our soldiers did in fact follow orders fairly well. That doesn't mean they have to like it, and their discontent finds expression here.
Again, I emphasize that, based on numerous vet accounts, it was common knowledge for US line troops that the Afghan army units they were training and fighting alongside were routinely conducting the organized rape of children, right there in the camp next door, and it was again common knowledge that they were not supposed to interfere with this conduct. These were the Afghans with whom they could be expected to have the best relationship out of any in the country. I'm given to understand that it was common knowledge that a great many of the rural civilians were openly engaging in poppy cultivation to feed the global heroin market, and that a considerable portion of them were tacitly or enthusiastically supporting the Taliban. These were the people they were expected to fight beside and for, enduring daily misery and constant threat of sudden, violent death, possibly from their own allies, in pursuit of an obviously impossible and pointless mission.
I'm not what you might call a genocide enjoyer. I think genocide is pretty bad, and if anyone reading this is considering genocide, please don't do it. If you wanted to figure out a way to get a person to support the idea of genocide, though, the above seems like a pretty good way to do it. I do not think this is a moral failing of American vets; I think this is how humans naturally respond when you trap them long-term in a deplorable environment.
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