Surrendering Taliban militants stand with their weapons as they are presented to reporters on Nov. 4, 2010 in Herat, Afghanistan.
For centuries in Afghanistan, when a rival force had come to power, the defeated one would put down their weapons and be integrated into the new power structure - obviously with much less power, or none at all. That's how you do with neighbors you have to continue to live with. This isn't a football game, where the teams go to different cities when it's over. That may be hard for us to remember, because the U.S. hasn't fought a protracted war on its own soil since the Civil War.
So when the Taliban came to surrender, the U.S. turned them down repeatedly, in a series of arrogant blunders spelled out in Anand Gopal's investigative treatment of the Afghanistan war, "No Good Men Among the Living."
Only full annihilation was enough for the Bush administration. They wanted more terrorists in body bags. The problem was that the Taliban had stopped fighting, having either fled to Pakistan or melted back into civilian life. Al Qaeda, for its part, was down to a handful of members.
So how do you kill terrorists if there aren't any?
Comment: And why on Earth would that be in US interest to do so?
Because parking itself in the middle of Central Asia gave it the means to suppress Russian/Chinese/Iranian influence in the region.
They were never interested in 'democratizing' or 'rebuilding' Afghanistan; it's meant to remain a third world country, forever.