It would be an interesting discussion, but it is one we could pre-empt and summarize by quoting Sir William Francis Butler:

“The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”

In a nutshell, we have carefully inculcated the values and mores of defeat into our elites through our institutions of education and governance. Fixing this will mean rendering those institutions irrelevant, and they seem hell-bent on making themselves so. End state and aftermath remain unpredictable.

The arguments made here in this post are basically ignoring about nine-tenths of the actual history. Our informant here is ignoring the prior history of it all, ignoring the previous Afghan efforts of the Company and Raj. Afghanistan was a gaping, bleeding wound on the Northwest Frontier, and had been for centuries. Elphinstone was making an inept, yet honest attempt to “try something different…”, in an ultimately futile effort to staunch the wound. Punitive expeditions had been tried, and proved not to produce lasting results.

In truth, the only way you are going to solve the problem of Afghanistan and the Tribal Territories swiftly is going to be removal/destruction of the current population/culture, and replacing it with something else. Stalin or Pol Pot might have succeeded, maybe Cromwell, but no British leader of that era was going to “do the necessary”. Period. As well, what would the economic case be? During that era, Afghanistan had little to offer or justify the expenditure, so it was easier to let it bleed.

The “civilizing motive” isn’t really the problem, here; instead, it is the unwillingness to “stick it in”, and do what is necessary. Cortez went up against the Aztecs with similar motivations, and we have yet to see a resurgence of the old traditions of tearing out people’s hearts atop step pyramids. Contemplate that, and the difference in approaches taken, as well as methodologies.