This week marks the eighth anniversary of the first US-led bombing mission in Afghanistan: the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, the quest to remove the Taleban from power, destroy al-Qaeda and avenge the September 11 attacks.

Two months after the start of the military campaign I was in Kandahar — the political and spiritual home of the Taleban — and the sense of hope among ordinary Afghans was enormous. US troops were cheered and treated as heroes by children. Special Forces soldiers walked around with “I love New York” badges on their uniforms. The Taleban had fled. The mission appeared clear: rebuild the country and give Afghans a government and a country they could believe in again.

Even Western and Afghan cynics ground down by 30 years of conflict dared to hope that a new dawn was beckoning. I interviewed a member of the Taleban who vowed that they would be back and would never concede defeat. I viewed his pledge as empty bravado.

So it is in many ways stunning to see where we are today, eight years on, in terms of the policy debate in the US on how to proceed with a war that is being lost. In the White House, some members of President Obama’s team are even reading Lessons in Disaster, a book about flawed decision-making in the Vietnam War.

This week Mr Obama will hold two more sessions in the White House as he grapples with the most important decision of his presidency so far: whether to agree to a request by General Stanley McChrystal, his ground commander, for 40,000 more troops or whether to scale back the effort.

Those pushing for an Afghan “drawdown” and a narrower mission focused on destroying al-Qaeda there and in Pakistan — including Joe Biden, the Vice-President — fear Afghanistan could otherwise prove to be Mr Obama’s Vietnam: a military and political quagmire. They have been heartened by how successful the US has been in dismantling al-Qaeda and they question General McChrystal’s dire warning that Afghanistan could be lost within 12 months.

“I don’t foresee the return of the Taleban, and I want to be very clear that Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling,” General James Jones, Mr Obama’s National Security Adviser, said on Sunday.

Yet there is one critical element in the thinking of those urging Mr Obama to oppose the wishes of his ground commander, though is rarely cited in what has become a very public debate. It harks back to the heady days of optimism in the weeks after Operation Enduring Freedom.

Eight years on the Afghan people again feel betrayed. Many no longer see the US as a force for good but instead blame their presence for the escalating war. As General McChrystal himself pointed out in a speech in London last week, a Taleban roadside bomb that kills civilians does not necessarily bring opprobrium upon the Taleban but instead on the US military — the logic being that if the US military were not in Afghanistan the bomb would not have been planted.

It is this change of mind among the Afghan people about the US after eight years of disappointment that looms especially large in the internal White House debate. As one senior official put it: “In 2003 and 2004 the Afghans were buying what we were selling. I am not sure they want to buy what we’re selling any more.”

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