Our gripe, from the very start, should have been with Al Qaeda, not with the Taleban, and certainly not with Iraq, Syria, or Iran.
The only government which had any connection to the terrorists was the Taleban. However, even their connection was not in planning terrorist activities against the U.S., but in allowing them to have a base in Afghanistan.
Anyone without amnesia can remember that our own government at first tried to get the Taleban government to agree to at the least throwing the Al Qaeda camps out, much in the way we were able to talk the Sudanese into throwing them out earlier. This action by our own government is proof that even they realised that the Taleban had nothing to do with any attacks upon U.S. people or property.

Even after the Taleban refused to throw Al Qaeda out, the U.S. had the military capacity to surround Osama bin Laden and his group at Tora Bora, and then to kill or capture him. Instead, the Bush White House micro managed the battle on the ground at Tora Bora to the point where Osama and most of his group were able to escape.

No one in the West would argue that the Taleban represent principles that we respect. Nevertheless, it flies in the face of the principles of self-determination, which we used to uphold as vital to our foreign policy, to wage war on the Taleban. We as a nation are strong enough to pursue what should be little more than a minor military action against Osama without permission from the Taleban.
A large sector of Afghanistan agrees with the fundamentalist religion of wahabi sunni islam, as do our allies in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. insists that its female soldiers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia respect the mores of that culture. However, the U.S. complains bitterly, and inconsistently, about the mores of Islamists in Taleban-influenced Afghanistan, and in Shia controlled Basra.
It is time to stop letting the neo-con amateurs run our foreign policy, and our military.