My view is literally anachronistic, I suppose...

...because I'm looking at it from 2024. In that strictly literal sense, everything anyone says here about stuff that happened in the past is anachronistic.

I'm not convinced that the decision to go into Afghanistan was "sound strategic decision-making and by every educated account in the long-term strategic interests of the country." I am re-reading chunks of Andrew Bacevich's book, America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History--I have my copy here in the office. Here are some snippets regarding the period between 9/11 and our venture into Afghanistan:

"Every new administration arrives in office bearing its own foreign policy vision, which rarely survives the encounter with actual events. The vision of the new Bush administration, which came to power on January 20, 2001, was more ambitious and more concrete than most. It derived from specific convictions that President Clinton had willfully disregarded. Chief among those convictions was a belief in military assertiveness as the foundation of American global leadership....The events of 9/11 created the opportunity to act on this perceived imperative....Rumsfeld's very first impulse on 9/11 itself was to frame the problem in the broadest possible terms. 'Need to move swiftly...go massive--sweep it all up, things related and not.'"

I don't question that once the project was assigned to the military, that it was carried out as you indicated, with diligent efforts put forward and militarily strategic goals established and often met. As I noted previously, I feel that some of the Afghan warmaking had performative elements, and I would say those were coming from those in Washington D.C. and at the Pentagon; not the generals and service members who were in the field, who performed most admirably. But I wonder if, in flexing our muscle for all to see, we had reasonably thought out what the end-state of that military effort would be.