A couple of things here...
Bin Laden may have been the primary target, but the initial targeting of Afghanistan involved more than just targeting Bin Laden... it was also about eliminating Al Quaeda's ability to use Afghanistan as a base of operations. If the U.S. had taken out bin Laden but left others to carry on his legacy, it would have been seen as a failure.
Secondly is True that Bin Laden was targeted in Pakistan without "going to war". But they were only able to do that after months/years of intelligence gathering was able to locate him. There is no guarantee that they would have been able to locate Bin Laden in Afghanistan using the same tactics.
Fair enough…. It was always going to be a large military response to take out the Al Qaeda. 20 years of war against the Taliban and they just step right back into power was quite something to behold though.
In my opinion, as soon as the USofA decided to attack Iraq, Canada should have pulled out of the war in Afghanistan. We shouldn’t let our allies wage war without any consequences.
And, in the end, we did exactly what the old conservative trope was for not leaving…. We cut and ran without succeeding in the mission.
Afghanistan was an abysmal failure almost any way you slice it, other than eliminating Al Qaeda.
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