We'll never know because we put in just enough forces to achieve a tactical victory, but I suspect it would have been a different story if say 150,000 troops fo

We'll never know because we put in just enough forces to achieve a tactical victory, but I suspect it would have been a different story if say 150,000 troops for 10 years were traded for 500,000 troops for three years. In a mostly illiterate society I suspect the entire way of thinking behind things like honor killings has a shakier foundation than we would suspect. If over the period of turning from a 10 year old into a 13 year old, or from 13 to 16 the Taliban were a joke, you would notice, and when the American troops were gone you would still remember that they were not cool. The cause is lost because a decade of little boys growing up think that fighting against occupiers is cooler, and whatever the leaders of those groups say must hold some weight. If instead they learned to read, so that they had access to enough thinking to realize how small their elders' minds were, or if they learned math which is uncontroversial, but champions thinking over authority, they would have the foundation to overturn a tradition of validating cruelty and intolerance. Little kids are perceptive, and a few years of seeing intolerant elders and militants as losers, even if only for a small portion of their youth, may have made an immeasurable difference.