I think we should be dropping canned sunshine on them. Seriously.
Twice as often on days that the prevailing winds will push the fallout into northwest Pakistan.
Use up some of the old warheads out of our current allotment of 5113 devices. If we wind up with a mere 5084 nukes afterwards, that's okay. It's still enough of a deterrent for Russia/China.
Make the uncontrollable regions, uninhabitable.
Burn the poppy fields. As a warning. Nuke them if they grow back next year. As a warning. MIRV the entire country if they grow back a third time.
Leave.
Problem with a strategy like this is:
How many (in percentage, and in real numbers) of the 28 million people in Afghanistan have taken action out of a desire to damage the US (or western society, or whatever), and how many of them don't actually care one way or the other, or would support us if they dared?
Roughly 50% of the population there is going to be women. How many
women join the terrorist jihad? (I seem to recall that there have been some, but they're a vanishingly small number).
So what's an acceptable level of innocent casualties as collateral damage? 30%? 10%? Or in real numbers, 10 million? 1 million? If we assume that
half of the women alone are jihadis, that's 7 million women who are
not. How many of them is it ok to kill?
Killing innocents over there is going to do nothing to deter the bad guys that remain; if they cared about the innocents in their own country, chances are they wouldn't be the sort to have the ideologies that have led to this.
Whenever the death penalty thread comes up here on APS, even the people who are
for it usually have a "better that a criminal should go free than an innocent person be executed" view.
How can we be any less conservative at the idea of dealing out death to entire
regions of a country?
Even if we count as "working for the terrorists" those whose labor in some way aids them (growing food, for instance), how many of those workers do what they do with the intent to harm the West, versus how many are just trying to work to feed their children? We don't execute as an accessory the guy who sold a burger to the mass murderer the day before the mass murder; how then can we condemn the people who exist at a subsistence level and produce food that happens to end up on a terrorist's plate?
We dehumanize the innocent and uninvolved people of the region at the peril of our moral high ground. They killed what, less than 4000 Americans on 9/11. Nuking even a
small section of Afghanistan would kill or devastate a far greater number of innocents, and would only galvanize the remaining Jihadis
plus give them an American atrocity to
legitimately trot out for propaganda.