Comment by roenxi

I'm sure you're saying that from a place of honesty, but you clearly aren't speking for the people who actually make these decisions:

1. When the US actually wanted to get Bin Laden in a country that wouldn't extradite him, they sent a special ops team to Pakistan. They violated Pakistan's sovereignty a little bit and then everyone moved on. So the idea that they needed to launch a full invasion of Afghanistan is just silly and the people who sent the army knew that. They had to have had ulterior motives, or sending the military was so incompetent there would have been a very public purge of the US military leadership.

2. If we're saying the US military is a magic button to override the legal system in another country (which, fair enough, it is) then what is the issue with what Russia is doing? Their interests in Ukraine are more legitimate than the US not feeling like negotiating or due process for Bin Laden & friends. Of course if the US had spent a bit more time doing things legally, the planners would have had time to point out that a full scale invasion was counterproductive, and I think it is less obvious that Russia would have found something similar; I don't see how they could have dealt with what the US state department seems to be doing without an army. But hey, I'm not a diplomatic corps, maybe they could have come up with something.

And if I look at the wiki article [0], we see "The Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden to a neutral country for trial if the US would provide evidence of bin Laden's complicity in the attacks". Maybe 2-5 years of negotiating and some actual evidence would have been justified? The US must have had evidence against al-Q, because otherwise they couldn't have known who was responsible. if they'd negotiated to send him to Pakistan where the SEAL team is comfortable operating then they could have short circuited a lot of death, wasted time and wasted money.

I know you didn't say anything about the Russian invasion, but this is sort of my angle here - the actions in Afghanistan show that this sort of thing is a bit of a non-event as far as international politics goes. It is only a big deal because the US is making it one.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda#War_on_terror