> So if anything, we should have pursued Bin Laden even more vigorously back then. The Taliban were successful in buying enough time for him to hide with their false diplomacy.
The problem was, real intelligence on the whereabouts of Bin Laden and Al Qaida in general was extremely rare. It was the vigorousness with which we pursued Al Qaida that helped really poison the relationship with local Afghans. You had local elites claiming that their rivals were somehow related to Al Qaida, which usually resulted in innocent people being taken into custody, tortured and/or killed. You had some legitimate leads (but often on mid-level operatives at best) that resulted in extremely risky special forces operations in remote and treacherous terrain - often resulting in both US and civilian casualties. You do this enough and people hate you, you've got an insurgency.
> We were at least successful in destroying the Al Qaeda training centers in Afghanistan (successfully located, blown up, and dismantled).
Real "training centers" were something of a white whale for the military in Afghanistan. A lot of the supposed Al Qaida "training" was taking place in Kunar and Nuristan provinces, in particularly inhospitable terrain. We'd run military operations in these remote Nuristani valleys, US troops would die, we'd almost never capture anything of value, and local people would slowly get fed up with their husbands/children/etc. getting accidentally blown up in airstrikes.