I would stridently disagree that the initial invasion

of Afghanistan was performative. It was arguably the most effective campaign the U.S. military has ever waged in terms of strategic outcomes gained relative to cost or investment in personnel, materiel / logistics, and so forth. If anything, we probably should have gone a little heavier in the first 3 - 6 months (the 10th Mountain and 25th Infantry should have been close behind the SF ODA teams and CIA SAD). It is to Bush's (and Rumsfeld's, as much as I dislike the guy) credit that they leaned heavily on their staffs and combatant commanders and high-leverage, low visibility assets to get it done. It also doesn't hurt that the gap between U.S. military and the rest of the world in the world in the fall of 2001 was the largest it has ever been and potentially will ever be. Besides severely underestimating the willpower and reaction of the American voting population, Osama's biggest strategic mistake was that he didn't quite understand just how good the U.S. military was at the time, especially relative to his own assets.

Performative would have been 100,000+ on the ground within 3 - 4 months and flattening everything from Kandahar to Jalalabad. Instead, we went light, fast, and local.

It all blurs together in the regular person's mind these days - even the people who pay close attention to these kinds of things - largely because we were there for a generation, but Afghanistan didn't really turn truly south until late in the 2000's. There was somewhat regular but predictable violence throughout the country for most of the first 5 - 6 years (which is an eternity in an insurgency), but for those paying attention, it was the Helmand River, the Arghandab, the Korengal, and Nuristan in 2007 - 2009 that were very clear canaries in the coalmine. If anything, Obama's surge from 2009 - 2011 might have been a bit performative, but even then there was a good bit of operational and strategic need for it.