I don't necessarily share the parent commenter's sentiment towards Russia, but I'm curious about your statement - what would those goals of US in Afghanistan be? I mean except from extracting $2.26T from the taxpayers and distributing a significant portion of it to private sector and shareholders, tied to the Senate.
I think the goal was last attempt at nation building in middleeast (that started in 70s, due to oil being way more important for US than now). In order to do nation building of course you have to shake the country and its structure, but you try to shake out the bad people, install stable and reasonable government and plant seeds for democracy, try and introduce some liberalism, education, infrastructure.
It failed, yes. But it succeeded in great many places, eastern europe, large part of south east asia, some african countries.
Russia is just a sorry ass loser, their country is in downward spiral and needs to exert power over its sphere of influence, thing is that countries in that sphere some time ago decided they dont really want to be aligned. Thus Russia decided to punish Ukraine otherwise the rest will also fall out of sphere (ironically I think they accelerated that process even more).
