Jackson Jambalaya

Pakistan is worse off than it was in 2001, arguably, but the United States didn't declare war on Pakistan. Iran is certainly worse off than it was in 2001, but the United States didn't declare war on Iran, either. Personally, I think the argument for U.S. complicity in the success of Ahmadinejad is much stronger than the argument for U.S. complicity in terrorist networks in Pakistan, except to the extent that the old al-Qaeda and Taliban people fled to Pakistan after being forced out of Afghanistan, which should be seen as a relative improvement given that these same folks were (as you point out) previously running Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is better off than it was, but not as much better off as it should be. Now it looks as if the Taliban could regain control, which would obviously be a horrific outcome but is now being accepted in some foreign policy circles as an inevitability.

Iraq was a mistake, but it was a bipartisan mistake and the fact that the initial invasion was a mistake does not mean that abrupt withdrawal isn't going to make things worse.

Most of what I hear about Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan from people on both sides of the aisle, especially following Bhutto's assassination, sounds hopelessly naive. We are not going to win, break even, or quit and go clear, and the sooner people on both sides realize this, the better. There is no happy ending in the short term, and any long-term happy ending will have as much or more to do with internal politics of the region as with U.S. intervention.

This doesn't mean that our government has necessarily made things worse, in the aggregate. It just means that its power to make things better is limited by factors beyond its control. This isn't Walker, Texas Ranger. This isn't The A-Team. The story will not be that the United States swept in, solved a problem, and left. It's going to be much messier than that. It almost always is.

"looks as if the Taliban could regain control"?

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/12/exclusive-eyewi.html

Not true. From ABC News:
Afghanistan's government flag was raised Wednesday on what had been one of the biggest strongholds of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and a leading world center of heroin production.

The town of about 45,000 people was secured at about 9:30 a.m. as Afghan troops, steered by British soldiers and U.S. Green Berets, drove out remnants of the Taliban resistance from Musa Qala in the opium poppy region of northern Helmand.

As the only journalist to join NATO forces entering the town, I found it a ghost town abandoned by both the Taliban and its residents at the end of an eight-day coalition operation. The offensive was one of NATO's biggest in the country since Operation Anaconda in 2002.