The United States government had been tracking Osama bin Laden for years when he finally executed his longstanding mission of bringing fire to the skies of America. Former President Bill Clinton considered ordering a missile strike against what was suspected to be bin Laden’s compound, but held off for fear of inflicting civilian casualties. Decades later, the war President George W. Bush started has cost the lives of over 47,000 innocents, and American soldiers have paid their own price in blood and trauma. Few people questioned the war when it was launched in 2001. We should ask ourselves that question.

Despite knowledge that al Qaeda was the leading threat to American national security and that the Taliban were harboring them inside Afghanistan’s borders, the U.S. military had no war plans for invading Afghanistan. After 9/11, President Bush requested military options from the Pentagon. They offered him three: missile strikes, missile strikes supplemented by bombing raids, and ground invasion. Of the three options presented only one entailed a commitment of American ground troops to the battlefield in Afghanistan. Bush’s national security team remained fractured and indecisive for a month after the war, only choosing to send American troops into Afghanistan after tortured deliberations.

Thus, our invasion of Afghanistan was not foreordained, despite the impressions some have that regime change was the inevitable and necessary response to an attack on U.S. soil. Other military options would have sent the same retributive message without miring American soldiers in an unwinnable war that went on to last for 20 years. Yes, al Qaeda had a safe haven in Afghanistan, but the Taliban was so terrified of American retribution that they were the first government to express condolences to America after the 9/11 attacks. They were also completely isolated internationally and at risk of becoming a pariah state. Sufficient force, short of invasion, could conceivably have persuaded them to expel al Qaeda in order to ensure the continuity of their regime.

Further, jihadi terrorist groups have had other safe havens in the years since, and the United States has been able to defeat them or at least avoid attacks. Pakistan seethes with jihadists, yet no one would consider an invasion of Pakistan unless the regime collapsed and their nuclear weapons became insecure. The so-called Islamic State conquered a territory the size of Great Britain and was destroyed with a concerted military campaign (mostly air power and special operations) led by Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin. The point is that safe havens are manageable and it is not necessarily the case that we need regime change to protect ourselves from terrorists who inhabit them.

Instead, we invaded. The House of Representatives’ vote in favor of military action was 420-1. The vote in the Senate: 98-0. The only holdout was Congresswoman Barbara Lee, a longtime pacifist from Berkeley, California who warned that going to war in a remote, little-understood country half a world away on the basis of retaliation was ill-advised. Literally no one else in Congress publicly questioned the wisdom of a ground war in Afghanistan and few would in the future as American indifference took hold. Perhaps it is too easy to attribute Congress’s lopsided vote to war fever, but the lack of even a bit of debate over a ground invasion must make one question whether it was given the consideration it deserved.

America and allied states have paid a heavy price for this war. The United States spent $2 trillion, the equivalent of the largest economic stimulus in the country’s history, in an effort that has ended with Taliban fighters evicting the U.S.-backed government in Kabul with almost no resistance whatsoever. The war could, perhaps, have gone better if one or two or however many other things had broken in other directions, but from this vantage point Americans must ask whether it was worth it, and whether we should have launched the war at all.