[ToifvT5S]

The colonial powers won wars against enemies that did not wear shoes, in an age where communications were limited, and the world was a lot larger, and they only "won" if you take a snap shot on a particular date in history, if you look at the map today, all the empires of the colonial powers are gone.

And most of them not through being defeated by guerilla armies. Most colonies were given up willingly, or primarily through pressure on the home front, not because they got booted.

As for the power differential, it's greater today than in colonial times. Taliban AK-47s and 1970s rocket launchers vs. the US military is actually a lot LESS useful than scimitars and horses vs. muskets. It shows in the casualty rates. The colonial powers used to take pretty steep casualties during engagements in those wars. US forces have yet to experience a high casualty event, defined as 100 fatalities in a single battle. Never even came close. Compare that to Vietnam, where US forces regularly lost hundreds dead in battles.

The Phillipines are independent because we chose to make them independent.

Also, we don't need much space to create a stable Afghan government. A year or two of relative peace is sufficient. I think we'd gladly take the 35 years of peace between the defeat of Aguinaldo and the setting up of a functioning Filipino government.

The empire gave up their colonies because it cost more to maintain the colonies than the empires were realizing in revenue, because the guerrilla armies or the non violent pacifist opposition made the maintenance of the colony financially untenable. Self financed colonies can remain colonies forever if they provide net revenue to the empire, once the cost of maintaining a colony exceeds the revenue, for the foreseeable future, what is the point ?

The Philippines are independent because the Japanese drove the US out, and the Philippine insurgency made a deal with the US, that they would ally with them to drive the Japanese out, in exchange for independence.
I don't see the benefit the US gained by killing 50,000 Filipinos, if the US had imply allowed the Philippines self determination after the Spanish American war, I think everyone would have been better off.
The US military would not have that massive stain on it's honor, waterboarding would not have come to the US as a method of extracting confessions from criminal suspects.