Would American economic aid really prevented Taliban ascendance ?

Very good points. I don't know if it would have made a difference. At the end Gus hands him the cable that says the crazies are rolling in Kandahar like a bathtub drain. So the Taliban had already been in existence as part of the Mujahideen. They were simply waiting for the retreat of the Soviets to make their move. It's not like they appeared years later because no one helped rebuild Afghanistan. We might have actually helped them even more by sending more money to Afghanistan that they would have stolen or used to make themselves even stronger.

It's fair to argue that we would never have changed Afghanistan for the better even if we had stayed there and tried to help them build the structure of a modern state. It likely would have taken perhaps a century to even get something legitimate established in a country so backward and barren.

However, you cannot deny that over the next decade, something went horribly wrong with U.S.-Afghanistan relations. A country like Afghanistan does not go from being helped by the United States in such an all-important struggle and then turns on us in the form of mass terrorism in the span of roughly a decade for no reason.

When Wilson concedes that we *beep* up the end game" all he meant is that we failed to maintain our goodwill and solidarity with a country we took serious risks to help. We ultimately paid a huge price. How we could have gone about it differently is anybody's guess, even with the benefit of hindsight.

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