We are kinda arguing past each other, I rather not do this, so I am going to make my points and finish this.

1a) We conquered Afghanistan in about 6 months Sept/Oct 2001 to March 2002. After Operation Anaconda the war as we traditionally call war was over. The Taliban (of that time frame) was mostly destroyed and the remains (that will morph into the new Taliban we are fighting today) was dislocated to 4 proviences in Southern Afghanistan and a good portion of Pakistan.
1b) The 6 month war of Afghanistan should be compared to the entirety of World War II. The following 10 years of the Afghanistan conflict should not be compared to World War II but instead the occupation of Japan and Germany following VE and VJ day. Less focus on the occupation of Germany should be analyzed since we split that country into 4 different sections and we only ruled the most southern part of Germany. It is irresponsible to compare troop numbers of the occupation of today's Afghanistan vs the fighting levels of Germany or Japan. This is why my Japan numbers were describing occupation numbers and not the war numbers.
The current conflict in Afghanistan is not war and shouldn't be called war, it is an occupation. There was little to no resistance to the US occupation of Germany and Japan after the wars were over, thus I ain't going to argue with you about groups that existed while the war was being fought in 1941 to 1945.

2) Our problem with Afghanistan (and a good part of Iraq) is that we thought we could through money and soldiers at the problem and that would make the problem go away. Lets call this mindset "subcontracting" our responsibility. We only succeeded with Iraq once the Sunnis wanted to play deal, for they were tired of Al Qaeda in Iraq, they were tired of a civil war between Sunni and Shia.

3) At the same time the Sunnis were willing to play ball, we also were fighting the war in Iraq smarter and focusing on more of counter insurgency.

4a) We are not going to win in Afghanistan, it is too late. Afghanistan is now Afghanistan's problem we just can put band aids on the situation but we can't fight the underlying disease only Afghans can.

4b) I am in complete agreement with you, we never went in Afghanistan with the will to win it. We did half measures and went with the "cheapest option", instead of trying to rebuild it right. Because we didn't try to rebuild it right from the get go, it is going to be a mess that we leave 10 years later. Furthermore in the end it wasn't cheap for we spent 10 years trying to cover up the problems of Afghanistan instead of rebuilding the Afghan culture from the beginning. 10 years of fighting, death, and insurgency vs counter insurgency is not cheap.