I wish I could agree with you that there were alternative steps that could have been taken (and that had a reasonable chance of "success"). I still don't see what those alternative steps would have been: from my perspective, at least, any attempts to distinguish between the high councils of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda seems... artificial.
>One could be quite sympathetic to the argument that the military operation
>in Afghanistan was a police operation aimed at Al Quaeda, if anyone was
>making that argument. It might also be argued that the destruction of the
>Taliban made the world a safer place for us, or that it made Afghanistan
>sufficiently better a place to justify the risk. But I don't like the
>implication that we had to go and fight the war that was fought because we
>owe no less to our glorious dead. Enniskillen and Omagh, among other towns
>of this world, are full of people who have become a little weary of that
>kind of argument...
Touche...