While I certainly agree the ideal would be to revert Afghanistan to the pre Soviet-invasion culture, that's a task impossible for any foreign power to accomplis

While I certainly agree the ideal would be to revert Afghanistan to the pre Soviet-invasion culture, that's a task impossible for any foreign power to accomplish. It would have to come from within, be organic, to be sustainable. No outside power can afford the cost necessary to give Afghanistan a long-term umbrella required to develop relatively quickly. The US couldn't afford to do it, nobody else is going to be able or willing to try. The reason the US is willing to side with less than ideal groups is because there are no practical alternatives, you need a large pillar to put in place or it'll all just fold that much faster when confronted by the Taliban. There are few large pillars in Afghanistan in terms of power structures. The moment the US is gone, the Taliban will immediately press and crush the central government (regardless of which group is in power at the time), any agreements the Taliban sign will be ignored just as North Vietnam ignored everything they agreed to and immediately resumed their conquest. The Northern Alliance was able to very rapidly smash the Taliban with the help of the US (the Taliban can't easily hold Afghanistan as a military force, so chaos and civil war is guaranteed in the near future). The challenge now and in the future is how to make any positive progress stick. The various powerful groups there, and their perma foreign sponsors (eg Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, etc), are not going to stop trying to topple eachother. The only thing giving Iraq a shot at being an independent, functional nation is their oil resource providing considerable funding to support a central government; Afghanistan of course lacks anything comparable. I don't know where the economy is going to come from to fund a potent central government in Afghanistan (while the Taliban operates on the cheap in comparison). It obviously takes a very long time to build up an economy from scratch in a location like Afghanistan.