I'm not necessarily doubting this, but I feel like this is always a convenient goto excuse to criticize any terrible, unethical military strategy the US is responsible for. Is there good evidence that certain powerful corporations/people made so much money and have so much power that they could and did successfully pressure politicians for two decades across a bunch of administrations into staying in Afghanistan? Not only successfully pressuring them to start the war but successfully pressuring them to stay there for so long?

(I of course don't at all doubt that the big military contractors have been making a ton of money from the wars, but I'm specifically referring to their corporate influence being the primary/secondary/tertiary/etc. force behind why we were still in Afghanistan after two decades.)

My own uninformed Occam's razor assumption would've been that it's primarily a matter of tangled geopolitics rather than a military-industrial complex scheme from day one to today. That is, that the State Department and top-level strategists and policy advisors are mostly the people to blame.

Maybe it's all of the above or some complex mixture. But what I want to know is the actual individuals responsible, or at least where they're contained. Not just an opaque storm cloud labeled "the military-industrial complex" or "the Deep State". For example, it could potentially be the case that this narrative might actually unintentionally help to shield the people who are truly culpable.