Possibly make immediate design changes to ensure the exact same scenario doesn’t happen again. Then ignore it all and keep trucking because outside of the spectacular factor (and the grief of the victims), terrorism *really *doesn’t matter or affect anything on a large scale. IOW, treat it like y’all do school shootings ! ;).
I think that if the US had focused on Afghanistan, it might have actually had some success in creating a more tenable situation there.
We had a strong alliance of nations that could have helped us suppress the Taliban. Also, with ISIS becoming a recent entrant in Afghanistan’s civil conflict, we’re now beginning to see in Afghanistan the ripple effects of our disastrous decision to invade Iraq. Had we remained focused on Afghanistan, perhaps we could have worked out some sort of diplomatic understanding with neighboring Pakistan to help us keep some stability there. But even under the best circumstances, the situation is extremely complicated and delicate, with centuries-old ethnic and tribal rivalries that make it hard to establish anything like an Afghan nation-state.
Pretty much the way we did it without getting distracted by nation building and making deals with other countries and other internal groups. We blew a bunch of them to smithereens to start off and brought in troops. We didn’t send our best officers there and didn’t focus on capturing Bin Laden though, and from the start wasted resources on an occupation plan. And then we wasted even more resources going to Iraq, which was Bush’s plan from before the beginning.
In the real timeline we had a large percentage of the AQ leadership, including Bin Laden trapped in the caves of Tora Bora. Why would it be different if one of us, who actually followed events and know how it turned out went there using Bush as a meat puppet?? The only real difference I’m proposing is that instead of using local manpower, as we did in the real timeline…manpower that basically allowed some of the AQ top leadership to get away to Pakistan…we would be using our own troops and going all in on destroying those cave complexes. This is all stuff we could have done…we (or Bush et al) choose not to because for them Afghanistan was a side show. The REAL show, in their minds, was Iraq and they were putting the parts in motion to allow them to invade and conquer that country.
They could also just buy it for a whole lot less than the cost of a war. This is known as “Cut Lex Luthor a Check”. (WARNING! TV Tropes link!)
I don’t buy the notion that we had to go into Afghanistan because they wouldn’t give us bin Laden. We should have realized that Afghanistan is and likely always will be ungovernable. Don’t send in the troops and fire missiles at the al Qaeda training camps and the Taliban strongpoints, repeat as needed. Take away these two wars and the US could have spent its money more wisely and the deficit wouldn’t have exploded.
The invasion of Iraq was, of course, mind-bogglingly stupid for multiple reasons. Saddam was probably on the verge of being forced into exile (with leadership taken over by a less heinous Baathist dictator, probably as good an outcome as could be hoped for) but Cheney rushed the invasion before Saddam’s exile would thwart the opportunity.
In any event, countries which the U.S. took over should have been run for the benefit of their people and building on their own traditions, instead of using them for U.S. corporate profiteering and childish Friedmanist experiments. I don’t know what U.S. did wrong in Afghanistan, but if its policies there were even a fraction as corrupt and wrong-headed as in Iraq they were a travesty.
Profiteering for U.S. corporations wasn’t the main reason for Cheney’s adventures but they were a reason. Your calculus ignores that the war’s cost wasn’t subtracted from corporate profits, but rather financed by taxpayers (or, if you will, East Asian bond buyers) — indeed the “cost” of the war represented huge profit for many American corporations.
… As Whack-a-Mole pointed out when he Ninja’ed me:
What difference does it make whether some Doper knew where Osama was hiding? The Bushist cabal running the shit-show had excellent intelligence on where he was.