Our perpetual war

I am sick and goddamn tired of this war in Afghanistan.  Not just because of this most recent incident, where a soldier went out and murdered innocent men, women and children, but the whole thing - from the beginning.  I watched the Soviets invade Afghanistan (in an eye in the sky kind of way). They had plenty of money and a giant military. I have no idea what they ultimately hoped to accomplish, other than acquire another satellite country for themselves, but obviously they had to leave without accomplishing it. 
Who the fuck do we think we are? I understand the desire to go after Bin Laden.  If that had been our mission we could have accomplished it years ago and been done with it.
You can't stop people in a country, or even a band of terrorists, from finding somewhere to train themselves as an army.  Maybe you can find the camp and destroy it, but invading a whole country to do this is, well, stupid. In our own country, we have groups that train in camps to make their own little armies, and I don't see us dropping bombs on them.
So I was thinking about this horrifying incident and then read this article over at Eschaton. I have had friends who have gone there as government workers and others as contractors. Everyone knows the contractors who go to a war zone, make a shitload of money.  Even government workers who go make gobs of money. One of my friends was there and dealt with contractors, which got me thinking about all that we are building over there.
These people don't have a pot to piss in, and yet, we are building these bases all over the countryside.  Heaven forbid a soldier fighting a war can't go to fucking TGI Fridays for dinner  (and no, I have nothing against a soldier having a good meal). When we leave, our trash is left behind.  We have wasted billions, probably trillions of dollars on building this bullshit in a country that still brings their wares to the market on a goddamn donkey.  I'm sure they can just install some hitching posts outside the Pizza Hut.
When did we, as a country, decide that every other country in the world should be just like us. We keep doing this shit, we'll have no tourism industry either.