We've never messed with Afghanistan until they DID come out to fuck with us by harboring AQ. So by your own reckoning, we should go to Afghanistan and squish them.
Isn't that what Unknown is proposing?
The Afghanistan tyrants never came for us.
Rather they let some rich Saudis expats setup camp in a mountain region for a nice big wad of cash.
Yes there is the stated excuse of when we said turn them over in a couple days because we said so they didn't so we had to do a full on invasion... (kind of like the start of WWI I guess.)
Few countries like being directly threatened even if they are weak and stupid, best just go grab what you want and get out before they know what happened,
(which is what we did in Pakistan later on)
What we should have done is simply nuked OBL's hideout and called it a day, no boots on the ground, just a couple really big specially built fusion bombs and no more OBL or any of his ilk and nobody wanting to give terrorists a place in their country.
However we decided to do full on invasion, and let OBL escape to live happily with our "allies" the Pakistanis for the next decade or so till we got around to doing what we should have done in the first place... go wack him and get back home and be done.