The Cold War, Vietnam War and the Korean war never cost this much

[mmarlo 1]

I'm running out of wind, so let me just quote directly from the article I linked above because I don't really have much to add. I respect your point, and I think it's the standard one, pretty much agreed upon by the left. But I think there were other options on the table, especially since the evidence of Afghanistan's role in the 9/11 attacks was at best a "belief".

From Noam Chomsky, 2005. Simple Truths, Hard Problems: Some thoughts on terror, justice, and self-defence. Philosophy 80: 5-28.

"Let us turn to the war in Afghanistan, considered such a paradigm example of just war that there is scarcely even any discussion about it. The respected moral-political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain summarizes received opinion fairly accurately when she writes approvingly that only absolute pacifists and outright lunatics doubt that this was uncontroversially a just war. Here, once again, factual questions arise. First, recall the war aims: to punish Afghans until the Taliban agree to hand over Osama bin Laden without evidence. Contrary to much subsequent commentary,

overthrowing the Taliban regime was an afterthought, added after several weeks of bombing. Second, there is quite good evidence bearing on the belief that only lunatics or absolute pacifists did not join the chorus of approval. An international Gallup poll after the bombing was announced but before it began found very limited support for it, almost none if civilians were targeted, as they were from the first moment. And even that tepid support was based on the presupposition that the targets were known to have been responsible for the 11 September attacks. They were not. Eight

months later, the head of the FBI testified to the Senate that after the most intensive international intelligence inquiry in history, the most that could be said was that the plot was ‘believed’ to have been hatched in Afghanistan, while the attacks were planned and financed elsewhere. It follows that there was no detectable popular support for the bombing, contrary to confident standard claims, apart from a very few countries; and of course Western elites. Afghan opinion is harder to estimate, but we do know that after several weeks of bombing, leading anti-Taliban figures, including

some of those most respected by the US and President Karzai, were denouncing the bombing, calling for it to end, and charging the US

with bombing just to ‘show off its muscle’ while undermining their efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within."