Putting hard military power in Afghanistan is the closest they can get to the Belt and Road Initiative, that runs across Central Asia. If we had to impact that with military power, we are in a position to do so in Afghanistan.
We are cheek and jowl with the potentially most unstable nuclear stockpile on the face of the earth in Pakistan. We wanna be able to leap on that stockpile, and stabilize it if necessary.
And the third reason we are there is because there are 20 million Uighurs, and they don't like Han Chinese in Xinjiang Province of Western China. And if the CIA has to mount an operation using those Uighurs, as Erdogan did in Turkey against Assad… there are 20,000 of them in Id Lib in Syria right now, for example. That’s why the Chinese might be deploying military forces to Syria in the very near future, to take care of those Uighurs, that Erdogan invited in. Well the CIA would want to destabilize China, and that would be the best way to do it.
What benefit does the US get from the war in Afghanistan? Seems so pointless, even from an imperial perspective.
It's right next to Pakistan's nukes and China's Belt and Road plans. Look at where Xinjiang is and all of this starts to make a lot more sense.
"In a partial survey conducted by the Afghan Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, the country’s mineral wealth is estimated at $3 trillion, more than enough to compensate for the war’s cost."
Transcript of Lawrence Wilkerson, retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powel:
A great exposé on the history of the Afghanistan War
I can think of a couple of reasons.