It's a tin man, then: no brain! In dollars fairly cheap up-front -- drones cost plenty sure, but less than the alternatives. But what's the actual strategy part there? Help the Taliban kill a few thousand IS-K fighters, maybe killing a few tens of thousands of Afghanistan? Make all-out air war against the Taliban? Use it to try to enforce some sort of 'red lines' with them, still be be forced out? As an idea it seems less pros-and-cons, than various downsides strung loosely together. OTOH it does seem to be where we are.
The total US defence budget is $715 billion. (I know I've been trying to generalise this to the Western Coalition, in the spirit of spreading the blame and the responsibility around, but I'll freely acknowledge that it's very much been the US's project from the beginning, it make the strategic decision to start it, and the one to end it, and besides, I'm too lazy to add up the Long Tail of the other participants much lower (both absolutely and famously even relatively) military spending levels.) Now having watched almost all of the famous "Critical Race Theory" Congressional hearing, I appreciate that Representatives would very happily spend all of that, and more, without troubling to wonder if they were actually defending anything. Just as long as they each get (at least) their share of the pork. Western-style democracy at its finest! But I don't think it's wildly unreasonable to consider spending some of it on propping up countries that have a track record of turning into outright failed states and both actively and passively hosting anti-US and anti-Western terrorism. Call me a closet neocon pawn of the military-industrial complex, I guess.
There was of course the "Trump surge", modest though it was compared to past such. I'm not familiar with every last operational detail in each of those years, but there's naturally a rough correlational between "conducting combat operations" and casualty rates. The "train the army, protect the embassy and the contractor" model in itself isn't a high risk. Relatively speaking. There were no US troop fatalities at all for 18 months, 2020-1, until the very recent bombing attacks, though presumably that's also partly due to the Trumiban withdrawal agreement.