@Red Rat: I guess you are right. It is important to remember how quickly the enemy has been 'defeated' and a good deal of the beating was given. The policy makers seemed to have turned quickly to nation-building, stating so much in it the Bonn agreement in December 2011.

Now paper is patient as the Germans say and between the saying and the doing lies the sea we Italians all too often state. The big questions are:

1) How shovel ready were the important political and economic projects. Were there enough of them?

2) How much mental effort and ressources were available and were directed towards them?

3) How smartly and efficently were those projects put into practice?

It would be nice to see for example the scorecard of basic physical infrastructure (streets, grids, water, ITC,...) created in the first years in Afghanistan after 9/11. At least that should be relatively easy to evaluate in an objective way.