Episode 348 - Was the war in Afghanistan worth it?

I am not a military specialist but I am aware of the great Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz. Among his many famous statements were this gem: "War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty." Afghanistan certainly seems to fit that phrase. What began as an inevitable need to find Usama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda cohorts after 9/11 and punish the Taliban for hosting them, turned into two decades of war, hundreds of thousands of casualties and billions of dollars spent. In August 2021 the US finally left and the Taliban came back to power; so what was the point? I speak with the author of an upcoming book on those years.