Mohamed Bin Tughlaq
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No choice but to save face, sunk costs, sunk political capital etc. The US after 9/11 was warned again and again not to start wider wars and destabilise entire regions, they did it anyway. Al Qaeda and not the Taliban attacked them, but that did not stop them from overthrowing the Taliban government, and then get the other side of the Afghan civil war (then known as the Northern Alliance, now known as the Afghan gov't) to power, this included giving the Northern Alliance the reigns to power in places where they were hated and had no business ruling.
So what the US inadvertently did is intervene, set up an artificial political system, with artificial power dynamics, pick one side of an on-going civil war that predated 9/11, and then fail at repeated opportunities to bring disaffected and taliban-like elements to the political process, several attempts were missed to treat the taliban as a reality and to build consensus (Bonn Agreement, Loya Jirga, Afghan elections)...
And what happens when you don't give people political space in which to operate legitimately? They won't just go away, they'll fight you as insurgents on their own terms.
Basically the US tried to relegate them to terrorists and treat them only as an armed militancy/nuisance, they completely missed their political importance, and they underestimated both their military resilience and they were completely blind to their presence elsewhere.
This delusion continued for some 15 years before engaging politically with the Taliban began being seen as an option in Washington. We went from an absurd "we do not negotiate with terrorists", to "'let's negotiate with the Taliban and get out asap".
They were simply outlasted