This ^^^.
I will add, we had the collective will as a nation to end the World Wars because we all shared the sacrifice via the drafting of our loved ones, much higher taxes and rationing, at the least. Right now, most of us live our lives without any daily reminder of the sacrifice our troops are making every, the exception being those whose loved ones are in harm's way.
Total War is Total War. Most wars aren't. That's why we were willing (for example) to burn entire cities full of Japanese citizens into ash, but we aren't willing to nuke Baram Chah. If we want to argue that we should transition this to a Total War footing and put the U.S. citizenry on it, alright; but understand that mean we are going to need to send a few hundred thousand more troops over, and then wipe out a significant percentage of the Pashtun people; much more than the Russians did, and they killed a
lot. If you are going to pick up the "we should have a timeline" argument, instead, I will ask you the question he repeatedly refused to answer: How many months should we have declared that we would fight WWII before we quit and let the Germans have Europe, the Japanese have Asia? At what point should we have decided that the Soviet Union threat to Western Europe had gone on so long, they deserved to have it, and we should withdraw?
I'm sorry if this sounds brusque, but wars are conditions-based, not time-based. You don't sign up to kill other human beings, but only so long as it's convenient or doesn't, like, become, like, a drag, or something. You do it because conditions have become such that it is worth killing them to change those conditions. We decided that Islamist radicals launching attacks in the West had become untenable to the point where we were willing to kill them in order to stop them from doing so. If that is still the case, then the timeline is irrelevant. If it is not the case, then
that is the debate (whether we are now willing to once again allow them to launch 9/11, 7/7, Madrid-train-bombing, or similar attacks in the West), not an arbitrary number of months.
But this idea that Either we put our entire populace on a Total War footing to take on and wipe out their entire populace OR we give up and let them win is a false dichotomy. Not only are not all wars Total Wars,
the vast majority of wars are conflicts like this, vice Total Wars.
