At the time, invading Afghanistan may have seemed like the right thing to do.
It was the base for a flurry of murderous terrorist attacks and was ruled by a brutal band of zealots who would sooner see a woman dead than in school. Geopolitics, moral indignation and a thirst for revenge all converged neatly on the need for military action.
But a decade on, the Taliban is still terrorizing Afghans, the national government is weak and irredeemably corrupt, and the aim of all the killing has shrunk to finding a somewhat graceful exit. There's little doubt Afghanistan will revert to either chaos or oppression when the Western troops head home.
Many Afghans likely can't see this day come soon enough. Last week, a lone American soldier crept through a village and shot 16 civilians in cold blood. This comes only weeks after American forces built a bonfire using stacks of the Qur'an, the Muslim scripture. So much for digging wells and building schools. This isn't a war for something anymore, it's just war - a bottomless pit for money and human lives.
It is a war launched for poorly defined goals in a land we didn't understand, and still don't. It's a war fought against a fiercely motivated foe who knows full well he simply has to wait the Westerners out.
Whether our reasons were good enough at the time is irrelevant. They're not good enough now and many innocent people have died violently as a result. It's time to leave Afghanistan to the Afghans.
