Afghanistan is a strategically important territory.

It has often enough been regarded and treated as such - but is it really any truer of Afghanistan other than many other places?

Basically it seems to me that right now the truth about the Afghan war is best expressed by the old soldiers chant "We're here because we're here because we're here..."(continue ad infinitum)

Someday the foreign soldiers will be pulled out, because of domestic politics back home, and within a couple of years whatever they leave behind in the way of a government will collapse, and the new power structure will be largely made up of the people who have been fighting on the other side. Whether that's going to happen a couple of years away, a decade or so, or half a century or more, the outcome is going to be essentially the same.