How can this bloody failure be regarded as a good war?

"But by intervening on one side of an ethnically charged civil war to overthrow the Taliban - rather than, say, targeting special forces against al-Qaida - the US and its allies ended up exchanging warlords for theocrats and turning most of the country into a collection of lawless and brutal fiefdoms. Instead of al-Qaida terror networks being rooted out, they were allowed to migrate to the borderlands, Pakistan and Iraq; Osama bin Laden, whose capture was the first aim of the war, escaped; and the limited expansion of women's and girls' freedoms in Kabul and a few other urban areas was offset by an eruption of rape and violence against women. Western politicians like to describe the Afghan government as democratically elected, when in fact the elections were marked by large-scale fraud and intimidation in polls that gave regional warlords pride of place, while political parties were not allowed to take part. In real life, occupied Afghanistan is, as the UN warned last year, a failed state, which now produces 90% of the world's opium and where corruption and insecurity have sunk reconstruction."

That would be Seumas Milne writing in The Grauniad.

About right.