The U.S. could have participated only in targeted strikes against Al Qaeda, leaving the rest to local forces as a local matter that isn't our business, and not tried to occupy the country and engage in nation-building.
If they had done just a targeted strike against Al Qaeda, larger in scope but similar to what they did against Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, we probably could have gotten Bin Laden years earlier and not spent more than a decade trying in the morass that is Afghanistan.
Our mistake was deciding that we needed to get rid of the Taliban and build a democratic nation from what was left after they were gone. There was never any hope of that; the Taliban just fled to the hills, to Pakistan, or just blend in with the local population because many of them are the local population. We have failed at building a nation that can take care of itself after we leave; within a year or two, the Taliban will be in power again.
Overthrowing the Taliban was almost a prerequisite for those types of strikes. The initial strikes and action in Afghanistan by special forces and CIA were almost completely reliant on assistance from the Northern Alliance - for which over throwing the Taliban was always the goal.
The initial air strikes (unguided from the ground) were totally useless. It wasn't until they got SF/CIA on the ground working with the Northern Alliance that they could get it working.
In any case, it would never have been as simple as 'leave it to the local forces'.
The U.S. could have participated only in targeted strikes against Al Qaeda, leaving the rest to local forces as a local matter that isn't our business, and not tried to occupy the country and engage in nation-building.
This is more or less our current counterterrorism strategy in the wilds of Pakistan or Yemen. While I'm skeptical that such a strategy could have seriously damaged 2001-era AQ's ability to operate inside Afghanistan, I also don't think I'm qualified to debate its merits today. But that's not my point.
My point is that if another 9/11-scale attack occurred and the bad guys were in Yemen and the Yemeni government was not extremely helpful in bringing those responsible to heel, that "drones and spies" strategy could never be the limit of our response. It's just not politically practical, not even close. When Schneier talks about the "waste" of a war in Afghanistan, he should remember that the entire time Bush was sticking around trying to nation build, the Democrats were making political hay that Iraq was a sideshow and that we weren't spending enough attention/money/troops on Afghanistan. And indeed when a Democratic president was elected, he proceeded to spend more attention/money/troops on Afghanistan.
Once it was established that AQ was responsible for 9/11 and that the Taliban were not going to give them up on our terms, a major military incursion was politically inevitable. It's a little more dicey just how inevitable a long-term occupation was: President Gore presumably doesn't have to deal with an Afghani-Hawks-By-Convenience wing of his own party, and maybe gets out quick. But Schneier doesn't make this distinction: He seems to be imagining a world in which the war never happens at all because we properly measured its risks. I happen to think he's wrong about the risk/reward tradeoff of aggressively rolling up AQ and their support networks, but I'm sure he's being Utopian if he thinks he's in anything but a tiny minority who would be against a massive military response to another 9/11-like event.
If they had done just a targeted strike against Al Qaeda, larger in scope but similar to what they did against Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, we probably could have gotten Bin Laden years earlier and not spent more than a decade trying in the morass that is Afghanistan.
If it were so easy, they would probably have done that anyway as an opener. But it isn't.
If they had done just a targeted strike against Al Qaeda, larger in scope but similar to what they did against Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, we probably could have gotten Bin Laden years earlier and not spent more than a decade trying in the morass that is Afghanistan.
Our mistake was deciding that we needed to get rid of the Taliban and build a democratic nation from what was left after they were gone. There was never any hope of that; the Taliban just fled to the hills, to Pakistan, or just blend in with the local population because many of them are the local population. We have failed at building a nation that can take care of itself after we leave; within a year or two, the Taliban will be in power again.