#Afghanistan once again proves to be the graveyard of empires. Fading empires have been fighting a totally counterproductive war there for 20 years. Even worse, the war cost 50% of Afghanistan's GDP. Money well spent? #NATO could've just made direct payments to Afghanis. Who would still support extremist militias if NATO had given the entire country a 50% raise for the 20 years. The stupidity of that war is unfathomable, it shows how broken the status quo politics are https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/16/20-years-western-intervention-afghanistan-terror
In purely military terms, the attacks of 9/11 have proven to be one of the strongest examples of asymmetrical warfare: Al Qaeda spent some 10s of millions to do $2 trillion in damage, and triggered NATO to spend trillions on wars that ended up killing more of their own people than the original 9/11 attacks did. Or to put it bluntly: the people of NATO got played
http://www.iags.org/costof911.html