You can't lead a social revolution from the outside
For Afghanistan to be transformed into a country that resembled a modern nation state required a major social revolution. Those do not succeed without passionate, charismatic, persistent and effective "local" leadership. Even then they usually fail. It tales a Kemal Atatürk or a Mao Detong, and their dedicated movements, to even begin to reweave the fabric of a nation's culture.
The last major Afghanistan leader opposing the Taliban who even remotely approached the prerequisite qualities to succeed was Ahmad Shah Massoud, who led Afghanistan's Northern Alliance but was assassinated on September 9, 2001. His forces at the time represented the only effective military resistance to the Taliban. His death two days prior to 9/11 removed him from the picture before the the United States committed ground forces to ousting the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. We will never know how Massoud might have altered the future of Afghanistan had he lived, but the deck was always heavily stacked against him because he came from an ethnic minority in Afghanistan, which always embraced tribal politics.
Here is a little about Massoud taken from an excellent long piece regarding him in Wikipedia:
"In September 2000, Massoud signed the Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women drafted by Afghan women. The declaration established gender equality in front of the law and the right of women to political participation, education, work, freedom of movement and speech. In the areas of Massoud, women and girls did not have to wear the Afghan burqa by law. They were allowed to work and to go to school. Although it was a time of war, girls' schools were operating in some districts. In at least two known instances, Massoud personally intervened against cases of forced marriage in favour of the women to make their own choice.[19]
While it was Massoud's stated personal conviction that men and women are equal and should enjoy the same rights, he also had to deal with Afghan traditions which he said would need a generation or more to overcome. In his opinion, that could only be achieved through education.[19] Author Pepe Escobar wrote in Massoud: From Warrior to Statesman:
Massoud is adamant that in Afghanistan women have suffered oppression for generations. He says that "the cultural environment of the country suffocates women. But the Taliban exacerbate this with oppression." His most ambitious project is to shatter this cultural prejudice and so give more space, freedom and equality to women—they would have the same rights as men.[19]
—?Pepe Escobar, in 'Massoud: From Warrior to Statesman'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Shah_Massoud"
The tens upon tens of billions of dollars the United States spent in Afghanistan attempting to stand up and then prop up an effective Afghanistan government and military barely penetrated the social fabric of that nation, because far too often we were just renting the loyalty of the "leaders" we worked with. Even though some here or there might have been sincere in their embrace of a modern future for Afghanistan, they had minimal, at best, influence on the bulk of the Afghan people who did not perceive them as true cultural or national leaders. Meanwhile the central government was riddled with corruption.
The United States never allied with leaders in Afghanistan capable of leading a social revolution. All the outside money in the world couldn't change Afghanistan without that.
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