1. Without going into particulars of military vs. softer responses, how then do you propose we conduct an investigative policy of counter-terror activities in a country hostile to our investigators without first establishing an environment a softer policy can survive in?
2. I'm certainly not unaware of that. All possible effort should be made to not kill innocents as it does indeed feed the terror machine. I would certainly like to see persons responsible for indiscriminate civilian deaths dealt with. But unless you are aware of a method, technological or otherwise, of identifying bad civilians from good civilians in a population a priori to bad civilians doing bad things, and of removing those people from the face of the earth without endangering the room full of people they shield themselves with, sometimes innocents will simply be caught in the cross-fire.
It's sad, it's unfortunate, but it happens. Apparently your decades of counter-terror experience says something different, please share an actual operational plan from intelligence gathering to final capture/kill of a notional bad-guy if that's not the case.
Outside of your naive and fantasy filled ruminations on how to conduct counter-terror operations, you do seem to be entirely ignorant of the reasons why we are conducting operations in Afghanistan in the first place and it had everything to do with establishing a Caliphate.
"Like the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, of Iran, Osama bin Laden made his anti-Western passion and plans clear in print years before gaining prominence through a frontal assault against America and its friends. The Encyclopedia of the Afghan Jihad, a multivolume guide to paramilitary and terrorist activity, written by his followers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, signaled bin Laden's intention to wage an anti-Western campaign far beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The encyclopedia was probably compiled and published in Peshawar, Pakistan, in late 1992. Because it doesn't provide a date or an exact place of printing (an intentional wartime evasiveness pervades the writing), one must make guesses about its provenance based on the text and on conversations with Pakistanis, Afghans, and Arabs. The encyclopedia, "one of the Sources of Energy for the faithful," was designed to transfer the knowledge and spirit gained from the "first brick of Islamic justice"—the successful war against Soviet communism—to a larger, more important campaign against the West, which bin Laden's statements have referred to only as kufr ("unbelief"), a classical-Islamic way of denoting geography by faith. The next jihad against America and its Muslim allies would, the authors of the encyclopedia prayed, lead to "the establishment of a castle of the Muslims, a [new] Caliphate"—a reference to the ruling politico-religious office of Islam's "golden age." For many fundamentalists, if not for the common man, the caliphate remains, at least sentimentally, the ideal geopolitical expression of Muslim universalism—an empire free of Westernized nation-states, where the shari'a, the holy law, reigns supreme, thus guaranteeing the union of Church and State and the brotherhood and strength of the faithful.
The aim of the encyclopedia and many smaller paramilitary and terrorist manuals that have appeared since 1992 is to democratize terrorism, to give to any true believer a portable guide to waging holy war worldwide. The encyclopedia has been found in print or on CD-ROM wherever al Qaeda has sent its cadres. Bin Laden and his followers also sought to accomplish philosophically what the Shi'ite Ayatollah Khomeini aspired to but never achieved: taking Islamic radicalism mainstream by forcing and dominating the discussion of holy war among the various strains of Sunni fundamentalism, which has become a significant force in every Middle Eastern country. Though unquestionably the most influential Muslim of modern times, Khomeini could never transcend the seventh-century division of Islamic society into those who recognize the legitimacy of the caliphal succession to the Prophet Muhammad (the Sunnis) and "the party of Ali" (the Shi'a), who believe that only Muhammad's son-in-law and his descendants can rightfully rule the Islamic world."
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2002/01/gerecht....
And lastly, it is the definition of naive to believe that "we're not getting any material benefit" from the war. You may not be, but many corporations have massive financial benefits and most politicians have re-election benefits (both pro-war and anti-war politicians, though primarily the pro-war variety).
It's just money spinning around the drain. What I mean by not gaining material benefit is that it's not like NATO troops are returning home with chests full of loot like returning Roman armies on the frontiers. There's no new input of valuables into the economies of the nations participating in Afghan counter-terror operations.