The New Yorker has an excellent article this week on the newly refurbished Kabul-to-Kandahar highway, on which the United States spent $270 million. It gives a good sense of how much still remains to be done in Afghanistan, and it serves as a reminder that the country remains insecure and violent, with a resurgent Taliban making gains for the same reason they did the last time around: because there is a gaping power vacuum.
Yes, the road got built — as one American official in Kabul put it, “It just goes to show what you can do when money is no object” — but I imagine that the country would be in much better shape if instead of invading Iraq, we had focused our military and financial resources on pacifying and rebuilding in Afghanistan. And considering that Afghanistan (and neighboring Pakistan) is where the terrorists actually are, that would have been a more obvious tactic in the war on terror.