It all depends on what you mean by victory.

By destroying or grievously wounding the Mafia you do not eliminate crime but you limit crime on a grand scale.

As long as there are deranged minds, in a free society somebody will occasionally strap on a bomb and blow up himself and some others or even park a fertilizer bomb outside a building. However, I think we can break up the well organized groups, destroy their leaders and eliminate their access to weapons of mass destruction and their capacity to commit mass murder.

You also can't go through life basing the future on what we have done in the past. In hindsight maybe it was not a good idea to arm the Afghans against the Russians. Maybe it doesn't really matter that much.

Bin Ladin hates us for defiling Saudi Arabia in the Gulf War. Was that a mistake? Saddam might almost be a super power by now and Osamma would have found another reason to hate us.

I believe what we are doing will make things a lot better, not perfect but a lot better.

Hopefully, for those that tire of life on Earth there will be homogeneous off-world colonies. Sadly, that seems to be even further in the future than it was two weeks ago