Fifteen years ago tonight U.S. Air Force B-1 and B-52 bombers attacked 31 targets in Afghanistan, described by then-President George W. Bush as “al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime.”
And so began America's Longest War - by far - with no end in sight.

The following day, President Bush confidently predicted victory.

"We know that slowly but surely the Taliban is crumbling," Bush said.

Ten days later, Vice President Cheney and General Tommy Franks displayed confidence to the point of arrogance.

“For the first time in our history,” Vice President Dick Cheney remarked on October 18, 2001, “we will probably suffer more casualties here at home in America than will our troops overseas.” General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, said early on that the war was not about “occupying major strategic terrain,” and therefore offered “the easiest exit strategy we’ve had in years.”

In the summer of 2004, President Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" in Afghanistan.

(CNN) -- President Bush on Tuesday claimed victory in the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and announced what he called five new initiatives to strengthen the links between that country and the United States...
"Coalition forces, including many brave Afghans, have brought America, Afghanistan and the world its first victory in the war on terror," the president said. "Afghanistan is no longer a terrorist factory sending thousands of killers into the world."
A short while later in the Afghan capital city of Kabul, NATO forces came under fire Tuesday when at least one rocket exploded outside their headquarters. One soldier suffered non-lifethreatening injuries, officials said.

Despite the war being won in 2004, the killing went on and got worse.
In 2008, Presidential-candidate Barak Obama predicted victory in Afghanistan.

We will end this war in Iraq. We will bring our troops home. We will finish the job -- we will finish the job against Al Qaida in Afghanistan.

Four years later, President Obama vowed again to "finish the job" in Afghanistan.
At the end of 2014, Obama made his own "Mission Accomplished" moment, while expanding the combat role of our troops there.

Despite all this promises of victory, despite all this public confidence, way back in 2012 NATO predicted that we would lose and the Taliban would prevail.

A secret US military report says the Taliban, heavily backed by Pakistan, are confident they can win the Afghanistan conflict, and that they are gaining popular support at the expense of the Kabul government.
The report, The State of the Taliban 2012, is the latest of a series drawn up by a US special operations taskforce on the basis of interrogations with 4,000 suspected Taliban and al-Qaida detainees.
Its conclusions, that the Taliban's strength and morale are largely intact despite the Nato military surge, and that significant numbers of Afghan government soldiers are defecting to them, are in stark contrast to Nato's far more bullish official line, that the insurgent movement has been severely damaged and demoralised....
The authors, American researchers attached to special forces, conclude that the weakness and venality of the government in Kabul is an increasing source of strength for the insurgents. "In the last year, there has been unprecedented interest, even from [Afghan government] members, in joining the insurgent cause. Afghan civilians frequently prefer Taliban governance over [the Afghan government], usually as a result of government corruption, ethnic bias and lack of connection with local religious and tribal leaders.

Like most things Afghanistan, Americans didn't notice that NATO predicted our eventual loss, nor would Americans have remembered if they had noticed.
Either way, Washington has kept up the game of make-believe, that everything is under control.

In July, Obama announced that the United States will leave 8,400 troops in Afghanistan—up from the 5,500 he originally called for. In the countryside, the Taliban is more powerful than ever.

A decade and a half later, the Taliban is back in force. It commands large parts of the countryside, and threatens major urban areas. Kunduz, in the north, has been going back and forth between the Taliban and the Afghan National Army. Just this week, the Taliban forces took the center of the city, only to be ejected a day later. In Helmand Province in the south, home of the US Surge, the Taliban threatens the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah. It already holds six of the fourteen districts of Helmand — Baghran, Dishu, Musa Qala, Nawa, Now Zad and Khanashin). The rest of the district is almost entirely dominated by the Taliban. Just north of Helmand, the Taliban threaten the provincial capital of Uruzgan — Tarin Kot. Much of southern Afghanistan, in other words, is in the craw of the Taliban.

“The Taliban now controls more territory than at any time since 2001,” the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said in a January report.
Earlier this week, the first American military member killed in that country fighting ISIS.
Just like last year, thousands are fleeing Kunduz, as the Taliban overrun parts of the city.

The toll of Afghanis is staggering.

As of August 2016, the U.S. war in Afghanistan has resulted in the deaths of 104,000 people, 31,000 of which were Afghan civilians, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs in Rhode Island...
In January 2012, a video surfaced of two U.S. Marines in full combat gear urinating on Taliban corpses. In February of the same year, two U.S. troops were killed as hundreds of Afghans violently protested the burning of religious materials by the American military. While Obama issued an apology and promised “to avoid any recurrence,” the Taliban called for attacks on Northern Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bases and military personnel.
Less than a month later, an American soldier left a combat outpost in the early morning hours for a town known to be sympathetic to the Taliban, and opened fire on several families, killing 16 people—nine of which were children.

That's not to say some people haven't made out well from this war, specifically drug lords.

Opium poppy cultivation levels in Afghanistan this year are the highest on record, said the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, adding that efforts to eradicate the crop have fallen flat.
“Unfortunately, preliminary results suggest that illicit cultivation has increased well above 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres),” UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov said on Wednesday., according to the text of a speech prepared for an international conference on Afghanistan in Brussels, Reuters reported.
“The production of opiates is expected to follow the same upward trend,” while eradication efforts have dropped to “close to zero,” Fedotov said.

Afghanistan is the largest narcostate in history.
Besides the drug lords, two other criminal elements have benefited from our occupation - war lords and politicians.

American taxpayers have spent more than $100 billion rebuilding Afghanistan, creating schools, hospitals and roads while making millionaires out of a rogue's gallery of warlords, gangsters and corrupt officials.
A total of $114 billion, which does not include even more spent on the military effort to oust the Taliban and stabilize the impoverished country, has been appropriated since 2002. While it has likely improved conditions in the country, corrupt builders, security providers, mercenaries and even local bankers have all taken their cuts - and gotten rich in the process.

Until we admit our failures, this war will never end.
But before we can do that we must acknowledge that we are still at war in Afghanistan.