Afghanistan was nothing more than a live training exercise for the U.S. military. The war in Afghanistan gave the young officers live battle training, and prepared the next generation of U.S. Military leadership.
In order to "win" in Afghanistan it would have required slaughtering a substantial percentage of the population, which is not a particularly popular way to operate.
However, if the Taliban was actually a threat to the U.S. then the Taliban would have been eliminated, and eliminated quickly.
Actually, I think it's more of a problem that we're not doomed. Us rich people living in rich temperate countries with good barriers between us and the poor countries will be "fine" (https://giphy.com/explore/everything-is-fine)
We'll hide in our air-conditioned houses, eat greenhouse grown food since the natural environment is fucked, playing with our robot factory produced toys. Life will suck, but we'll be "fine". We'll be spending tens of trillions on flood barriers and other mitigation measures, but we'll be "fine". Most of us anyways, super storms will definitely get some of us. Others will die on the borders defending the rest of us from climate refugees. But most of us will be "fine".
Anybody or anything else that isn't a homo sapiens living in a rich temperate nation will be doomed.
Fascists are close to take power in some Europeans countries just because they had to accept a few dozens thousands of migrants from Syria/Afghanistan. And you expect rich countries to stand when dozens if not hundreds of millions of people will have to leave their countries?
There would be mass murder for the rich to keep doing business as usual.
When I see Billionaires trying to "improve society" I spend my time trying to figure out the angle so that they not only don't spend any of their own money, but become far richer even if they fail spectacularly.
Easy, once the hospitals get overwhelmed nobody will be able to get hospital treatment. Everyone who needs to be hospitalized who isn't hospitalized WILL DIE. The hospitalization rate is about 20%. So right off the top we'll see about 6 million deaths.
Everyone who is sick will be stuck at home with family members, entire households will get sick, and they will keep re-infecting each other because, doubly difficult is the fact that there are multiple variants being spread, so it's possible to get re-infected with a different variant, the immune systems of the sick are overwhelmed and compromised. We'll see entire households dying. This is where the death rates really start to climb, it wouldn't surprise me if we see 8-9 Million deaths from this group.
Combine COVID with other illnesses and you get very high death rates.
Because Myanmar will be acting like a petri dish we'll start to see all kinds of variants get spawned, we could end up with a version the burns itself out. We could get a version that has 10-12 day incubation period where people are asymptomatic but that has a 50-80% death rate, a version like this could sweep back through the world with devastating effects.
Because some people are vaccinated and the vaccine is only 90% effective, we'll see people who are vaccinated who get sick. One of the variants could end up not be prevented by the vaccine, and that version could boomerang back through the world.
Mutation is always a risk, but another 25 million isn't a substantial increase in infected. There have already been 1-2+ billion infections globally, and 100+ million in the USA.
In order to "win" in Afghanistan it would have required slaughtering a substantial percentage of the population, which is not a particularly popular way to operate.
However, if the Taliban was actually a threat to the U.S. then the Taliban would have been eliminated, and eliminated quickly.