Was It Worth It, America?

I don't think there is a proper answer to that question. The emotions are just too big and too complex for such a small, simple question. Was it worth it? As compared to what? Doing nothing? Attacking elsewhere? Was it worth the life of your brother/husband/wife/child? What possibly could be? I don't think you can measure it objectively: this many schools built equals the life of one soldier. This many voters equals one traumatic brain injury.

What matters to me is that the injuries I suffered and the soldiers and friends I lost were in service to a country I love in a sincere attempt to make a safer world. That is not the same thing as saying the mission was well conceived or well managed. They were neither. But for the troops themselves, every one I served with did their level best to leave the country (in my case Iraq) better than they found it. We had no control over what happened next, but we did our jobs to the best of our abilities. Were their sacrifices worth it? I truly don't know. Ask me again tomorrow.

First, I want to commend the author for a very thoughtful piece. You can tell she gave it a lot of thought.
She of course, is coming from the perspective that she wants to believe her husband gave his life for something worthwhile. She recalls 9/11 and the ideals of freedom provided to those without it.

I have thought long and hard about how to answer this for myself.
BLUF - No, it was not worth it.

War is a series of tragedies, hopefully acheiving some goal of policy. From a macro-perspective, the war in Afghanistan's main point was to deny the country as a safe haven for Al-Queda and others to plan, resource, and execute attacks against the United States or it's allies. In that regard, we have been largely successful. However, go on the groung there and there are no fewer than 30 (56, last I saw) objectives to accomplish, many with conflicting aims. For example, furthering the empowerment of women through education initiatives. Sounds great if you are a Women's Studies Major fresh out of Colombia University wanting to make your mark in the world on your first assignment to a PRT.
Except.
It is fundamentally destabilizing in a tradtional patriarchy society, DE-stabilizing the social fabric when we are doing Stability Operations.
It makes those girls we are trying to help undesirable as wives (now that they are all "uppity") or worse, targets for the wrath of their more conservative relatives. Most of you have heard of acid attacks or burnings or cutting off noses. Meet one of those girls in person and it is a life-altering experience. And this is coming from their brothers, fathers, cousins, not your run-of-the-mill Taliban dirtbag.
We are starting things we can't finish. Societal transitions take generations - optimistically, three of them - and we simply are not committed for 50 years of social engineering in Afghanistan.
I am not saying it is not a noble goal to further the education of little girls in Aghanistan. I have a little girl that I love and dream that she will acheive great things. It is just that the empowerment of girls in Afghanistan has nothing to do with area denial and in many ways works against our strategic aims at a grassroots level.
And we won't acheive this goal, because we won't stay long enough to see it through.
This is just an example, but they are myriad and far from just anecdotes.
In summary, from a macro point of view, we are playing to not lose, not to win. And that is a sad, sad state of affairs.

From a more personal point of view, there have been many sacrifices made by anyone who has served. They don't call it the "service" for nothing.
All of us have lost time with our family. Some of us have lost our families altogether as the stress of deployments tore at the family fabric to the point of no return.
Divorce rates are rampant.
Suicide rates are historically high.
Thousands of veterans come home permanently affected by physical or mental wounds that will change their lives forever.
Over two thousand gave their lives, leaving a widow, orphans, or grieving mother to bury their Soldier far too early.

I'd like to say it was all worth it. I really would. As I watch Iraq devolve into chaos, Afghanistan greeted by yawns and non-commitment from our leaders, and worldwide messes growing bigger and bigger each passing day, I find myself questioning whether we are truly committed to our stated policies of peace, freedom, and stability around the world or if we are just plodding along, taking each crisis as a distraction worthy of scant attention, and only giving each conflict enough attention to have it go away from the nightly news.
Meanwhile, around the world thousands of servicemembers fight an enemy that can't even be accurately described with whatever they can scrounge up.

There is piece of me fertilizing a piece of desert in Iraq where I bled for my comrades. It was worth that price because I was able to help save two of my wounded comrades. The two who did not make it through that fight, died doing a mission with very little point. For them, it was not worth it.
In my many travels, all told I helped build scores of schools, electrical projects, infrastructure, and other initiatives. This cost many millions of dollars, not to mention the risk my Soldiers and I took every day to help people who cared only about making a buck from US forces. Very few of those projects survived the tour, much less posterity. Each project moved the SWEAT-MSC needle a bit, and bought some transitory goodwill and cooperation. In short, it was not worth it.
Within my unit, I have watched with increasing concern the toll that these deployments have taken on our families. Far too many children are acting out. Far too many wives are stressed to the point of calling it quits on the marriage. Far too many Soldiers are getting out, tired from doing this over and over.

My point is, if we are going to commit our lives, blood, and treasure to acheive national security policies and objectives, we need to play to win. Anything not directly working towards those objectives is a shaping operation at best and should be resourced accordingly.
If my country is in danger, I will be the first to stand up and say "send me". With the right Soldiers, training, and resources I have no doubt we can defeat any enemy.

We just simply are too distracted to care enough to commit what we need to win. And so long as that is the case, it is going to continue to not be worth it.

Was it worth it? From the standpoint of the Soldier who believes he/she is defending liberty...of course. In a given conflict, were the losses of all the military worth it? From the longer perspective, it depends on what our leaders and our fellow citizens do after those sacrifices. In Afghanistan, the jury is still out...it is a good sign that we are not in such a hurry to pull all troops out on the initial timeline. In Iraq, the precipitous withdrawal of troops on an artificial timeline probably wasted a lot of the blood and treasure sacrificed during the surge. Now that we are engaging again, we might have a second chance to honor those sacrifices by locking in the gains that were made.