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On the other hand, look at Korea. In hindsight it seems pretty clear that it was a huge loss to humanity that the US didn't push further north.

And of course, look at Afghanistan today.

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Uh, we did push further north?

That's why China intervened?

I am not sure what exactly you are suggesting here, but its hard to believe that a nuclear war against china (and likely the USSR) in 1951 as MacArthur seemed to believe was necessary to recover North Korea would have been a net positive.

Sure. I'm not saying it was possible. Just that history has clearly shown it was just.

Should the US have stayed involved or gotten involved with Afghanistan? Why? What good has come from it?

As a naive guess, if the US had somehow managed to avoid corruption at pretty much all levels in their Afganistan er... adventure, then either approach may have worked.

But the corruption just made a joke of everything, and of course it all ended badly. :(

In the cities millions of people had the best years of their lives due to US intervention. So in isolation that was a moral thing. But of course, they didn't manage to shift the balance away from islamism to secularism in the country. Probably because they didn't even try much. There was a cultural battle that the US largely tried to stay out of, even though that was the real battle all along.

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