When the United States went to war in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, the impetus and aims seemed clear. “Make no mistake,” President George W. Bush told reporters on September 11, “the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly attacks.” Within days, American bombs began to rain down on Kabul, Kandahar, and Jalalabad, in an effort to smoke out Osama bin Laden and cripple the Taliban regime that harbored him. In a matter of weeks, Kabul had fallen to coalition forces, the Taliban were on the run, and Hamid Karzai was sworn in as the leader of a new interim government. A swift victory appeared all but assured.

Today, 15 years after the invasion began, Afghanistan has turned into America’s longest war. More than 2,300 American troops have died in the conflict, which has cost U.S. taxpayers $686 billion. As a candidate, Barack Obama vowed that we would quickly “finish the job” in Afghanistan. Instead, Obama has presided over a war that went from dismal to disastrous. According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the Taliban gained ground this year, while the government in Kabul grows weaker. In July, Obama announced that the United States will leave 8,400 troops in Afghanistan—up from the 5,500 he originally called for. By almost any measure, we are moving backwards.

When the conflict began, no one guessed that America would become tangled in a forever war. As a candidate for president, Bush had famously derided the concept of nation-building. The mission in Afghanistan was supposed to be limited in scope: We would go in, get rid of the bad guys, and get out. “For the first time in our history,” Vice President Dick Cheney remarked on October 18, 2001, eleven days after the start of the war, “we will probably suffer more casualties here at home in America than will our troops overseas.” General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, said early on that the war was not about “occupying major strategic terrain,” and therefore offered “the easiest exit strategy we’ve had in years.”

Almost immediately, however, our ambitions metastasized. A month after the war began, First Lady Laura Bush framed the fight against terrorism as a fight for the “rights and dignity of women.” Her speech inspired a long procession of gender initiatives, and scores of Afghan women became pilots, police officers, soldiers, lawmakers, judges, and teachers. Millions of Afghan girls now attend school. Yet it remains common to hear of Afghan women who have been stoned to death, attacked with acid, or beaten by relatives. According to a report by the British government, more than 5,000 cases of violence against Afghan women—including 241 murders—were reported in the first half of this year.

Other initiatives have followed a similar trajectory. Each country in the U.S.-led coalition was assigned a project. Germany was tasked with police reform. Italy would overhaul the justice system. The United Kingdom was put in charge of counter-narcotics. But the fragmented approach further splintered the Afghan state. “Instead of responding to the needs of the population, the initiatives answered the objectives and agendas of the international sponsors,” says Timor Sharan, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. Today, police corruption is widespread, access to justice remains wildly uneven, and Afghanistan is still the world’s leading producer of opium.