Could there ever be a more vivid statement of how terribly wrong the U.S. mission in Afghanistan had gone? We made Afghanistan a better place! The cell phones! TV stations! Girls in schools! The U.S. effort in Afghanistan became perhaps the most spectacular example ever of misguided nation building. And now it is ending in spectacular failure because a nation building mission was bound to fail…

The failure was entirely bipartisan. But Republican President George W. Bush bears the greatest blame for sending the Afghan war down the wrong path. While Bush did do great damage to al Qaeda, he also began the nation building exercise. And in the process, he failed to find and kill bin Laden, or top deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, or Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader who aided and abetted the attacks. When, in 2003, U.S. forces captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the top planner of 9/11, the Bush administration failed to deliver the swift justice he deserved. KSM, who should have been executed by the United States many years ago, is alive today, held at the American facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

President Barack Obama, to his great credit, found and killed bin Laden. But U.S. forces never got Zawahiri, and no one today seems to know whether he is alive or dead. Mullah Omar also escaped U.S. retribution and reportedly died of tuberculosis in 2013. On the other hand, cell phone usage in Afghanistan skyrocketed.