"I may think the Taliban has strange ideas, may not agree with Al Queda, etc. but I think we (I am UK, another might be US) without clue created a horrible (literally) bloody mess."

Between April 1978 and October 2001 somewhere between 1.5 and 2.1 million Afghans were killed in fighting Afghans/Soviets/Afghans. The country was in ruins, three-quarters of the people were malnurished, Afghanistan's sgricultural base was destroyed and one third of the total population were either dead or living in refugee camps. Kabul resembled Berlin in May 1945 and its population had shrunk to 250,000.

Since October 2001 there have been armed forces operating inside Afghanistan tasked with protecting the general population as opposed to preying on them. Since October 2001 to the present the number of Afghan civilians killed in violence has been around 34,000 - That is a reduction in the death toll amongst the civilian population of 96%

Don't know about you but if I were an Afghan civilian I would tend to think that rather than creating a "bloody mess" things were moving markedly in the right direction.