“Not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”
I am not sure what exactly you are suggesting here, but its hard to believe that a nuclear war against china (and likely the USSR) in 1951 as MacArthur seemed to believe was necessary to recover North Korea would have been a net positive.
As a naive guess, if the US had somehow managed to avoid corruption at pretty much all levels in their Afganistan er... adventure, then either approach may have worked.
But the corruption just made a joke of everything, and of course it all ended badly. :(
In the cities millions of people had the best years of their lives due to US intervention. So in isolation that was a moral thing. But of course, they didn't manage to shift the balance away from islamism to secularism in the country. Probably because they didn't even try much. There was a cultural battle that the US largely tried to stay out of, even though that was the real battle all along.
