Matthew Yglesias says:

Opposition to the Afghan War does not imply, as a matter of formal logic, that you would oppose the use of American military power under all circumstances. But if you, like I, spent the fall of 2001 in a place where anti-war sentiment ran high, listening to anti-war speeches and lectures and protests and teach-ins, reading anti-war op-eds in your school paper, speaking to anti-war people in your daily life and so forth, it was clear that most of the publicly offered rationales for opposing the war did, in fact, imply that the speaker or writer was opposed to any and all use of American military power. The most common line of criticism I heard was that any action that resulted in the deaths of Afghan civilians was an illegitimate form of collective punishment. There's a certain logic to this position, but it's the logic of pacifism and it's not the basis of a viable national-security policy. Unless the Democratic Party and its advocates can say so, it's not going to win any elections for the foreseeable future.

This is part of the problem I have with many of the objections I hear to the use of the American military. Look, they say, our track record is horrible when it comes to trying to reform the governments of countries by force.

So I'm trying to follow the train of thought here...please help.

For those of you who supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban, please say why it was justified (and please do so without bringing up Iraq). Do you support trying to build a stable democracy there? If so, why? Is the rationale that we should only try to restructure governments of countries that we toppled the government of after first being attacked (e.g., Germany, Japan)?

With 20/20 hindsight, would you have supported the invasion of Afghanistan in, say, 1999, if you knew that it would disrupt the training and funding of the 9/11 plot and prevent that attack?