It used to be that the only purpose of war was victory. On Afghanistan, even after a decade of involvement there, that clarity is still not present. A mission that began in the fevered days after Osama bin Laden’s attack on New York and Washington, and which sought in those early days the defeat of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the rout of the Taliban, also quickly took on a secondary burden: that of rebuilding or helping to rebuild the Afghan state, of introducing some elements of Western-style democracy into the country, and of assisting as well in the building of its most basic infrastructure.
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