Is the war in Afghanistan being driven by electoral politics or security concerns?

Theater for the voter.

And for the pentagon and DoD - a justification for their budget.

And it doesn't hurt to make contractors wealthy while they suck
Every one dry.

al quida and extreme taliban is a mistake that will come back to bite us in the ass. The issue is not whether we should do some hostile action in Afghanistan, the issue is how to conduct that action. With out technology, the day is fast approaching when a robot can be dropped from a high flying, perform missions, including killing, then get picked up by a plane, with all the robots work remotely controlled by a soldier sitting in the USA homeland.

parties did not feel that they could be tagged with "losing Viet Nam to the Communist" even though many politicians of both parties realized that there was no rational possibility that the the U.S. could possibly win the war. Only when the war became so incredibly unpopular and most people thought it was already over anyway would the mainstream political establishment support a full withdraw. Given that Afghanistan is not the kind of headline news story that Viet Nam was and given that the American body count is relatively low - yet all sane and rational people have known for quite some time that any talk of victory in Afghanistan is ludicrous - it is hard to say when the mainstream political establishment will be willing to accept the political risk of "losing Afghanistan to the terrorist."

The marriage between the MIC and and Congress has been complete for a while.

The current merger in process is between the MIC/Government and the Fortune 500.

The components of this vast machine will determine their common interests, consolidate power, and rule ruthlessly until there is some sort of radical breakdown.