The Task is: Defeat AQ
The Purpose is: Defend the Homeland
Afghanistan is merely where we went to make progress toward that objective, and at the start the Taliban were in the way, so we conducted a very successful UW operation to help the Northern Alliance remove the Taliban from leadership so that we could get at AQ.
Since then we have been conducting FID to try to help the Karzai Govt get it's act together, and CT ops against AQ. Everything else is mission creep. Tricky business getting involved in someone elses problems, even if it is to work on some of your own. But this has never been a US war against the Taliban.
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