I mean, basically every trend of the past 20 years got a lot better while the military were present in Afghanistan, by definition. Internet use and smartphone

I mean, basically every trend of the past 20 years got a lot better while the military were present in Afghanistan, by definition. Internet use and smartphone use exploded during the Afghanistan war, Netflix use got much higher, social division got much worse, and asset prices got much higher. I doubt many of those had much to do with the Afghan war (except possibly the last, with low interest rates to finance government war spending inflating asset prices).