Feanor

Yes, you can't make "peace" with guns.
But you know, the "peace missions" were invented to work around the constitutional limitations and/or political issues in some US allies. Same goes for ideas like "smart bombs" and the "digital war" they show you on TV, like it was a videogame where nobody gets hurt.

Then there is the famous "clash of civilizations".
This is a long discussion that can be summarized in "how to deal with the muslims?". The view on this topic in Europe is different than US for many reasons. If you want my opinion, there can't be "peace" until Islam evolves getting out of the middle ages and it needs generations, if ever. Meanwhile it makes no sense speaking of "democracy" and "freedom" or "State", "religion" and "Law" in the american/european sense, they are all unknown concepts. Not "forgotten" like Germany during the Nazist regime, "unknown" like another planet. The western troops in Afghanistan are like invaders for Mars. Then if the goal of the war is to transform Afghanistan in a "State", that is pretty much impossible, unless we want the war to last for 500 years.

And how will you name the new country?

Anneland doesn't sound bad. But beware if you see a distant sail, it could be me...

Yes, in history it always worked that way, you go asking the american natives...

This is optimism. You see a distant sail and think it is the Love Boat.

In Afghanistan Italy is operating as NATO member. The NATO treaty requires all the Nations to defend the attacked member. Since USA got attacked at 11/9, NATO sent multi-national troops to Afghanistan. Of course the situation isn't that simple because in Afghanistan there isn't a real enemy to fight, there are those cavemen who hate basically everybody who does not belong to their tribe, plus all the fanatic muslims that come from all over to fight the "infidels".

That is the real reason of the current wars, basically they are about attracting all the fanatics to shoot at armed troops in some desert land instead of having them making terrorist attacks against unarmed civilians in Europe or USA. Looking at things in this perspective, soldiers are fighting to defend their country.

The official mission as "taking democracy to the Afghans" is a joke. I guess Afghanistan is the last place on Earth where you can expect such a change in our life time.

The unofficial mission as "make all the fanatic muslims come to this nowhere land and fight against our best armies" is somehow a success and more time passes and more those organizations like al-quaeda are weakened by the attrition. It has been proven that all those organizations aren't effective when opposed to a modern army in fact the losses rate for the troops is the lower in history. Currently NATO is controlling Afghanistan with a ridiculous small number of troops on the field.

Problem is this war of attrition is meant to go on forever, which is difficult to even imagine for democracies. This, coupled with the fact we are always paralyzed by contradictions, makes difficult to understand what we want to achieve and how.