"Mission creep in Afghanistan"

John Aravosis (AMERICAblog):

An interesting point I hadn't thought about:

Yet, eight years of war with no end in sight leaves other military experts vexed. "Having to a great extent captured, killed, and seriously disrupted the al-Qaeda leadership and training infrastructure in Afghanistan, the necessity, and therefore strategy for this war, has gotten away from us," Air Force Major Jeremy Kotkin, a strategist with the U.S. Special Operations Command, wrote Monday in Small Wars Journal, an independent counter-insurgency blog. "We have transferred the consequence of the very real threat of al-Qaeda to the Taliban, to fields of Afghan poppies, and to the political and economic shambles that was and is Afghanistan." Such mission creep, he argues, has made the nation's task in Afghanistan far tougher than originally intended.

Then again, we did blow up their country - albeit justifiably - so doesn't that leave us with a greater obligation than simply disrupting Al Qaeda? Or at some point, does the moral imperative of "leaving the country a better place than we found it" get overridden by the reality that it's not clear if we can accomplish that goal at all?