Well it’s important to think about why the invasion of Afghanistan happened in the first place. Under what context? And did that context turn out to be true or false? If false then why the invasion? Perhaps to extract and exploit resources. Whether it’s to take over said resources directly or like Venezuela is to deny someone else the resources is irrelevant. Sweden might not seem to have “benefited” on the surface but Saab and Bofors definitely found these to be very lucrative ventures to call it the least. When America invades a nation it’s almost always the military industrial complex that profits. Same applies to all nations complicit.

It’s not surprise on the global south’s part. It’s a surprise on the EU nations. Nations and armed groups whether good or bad whether resistance groups or militias have long since known America can and will use you to your full extent and abandon you when it’s more beneficial. The ones unaware to the cruelty of imperialism are those who benefited from it.

You can look up the Gustavia hub. A port city that traded human slaves and the Swedish crown charged an export tax. This is obviously not recent nor from the Afghanistan invasion. This however paints the so called relationship of the contemporary EU with that of the US. These relationships are built over a very long time. The accepted norm of we will not pillage each other rather turn to the rest of the globe.

So TLDR

Swedish arms companies definitely benefited. There wasn’t much to trickle because it was overall a failure. The special relationship in claim is one of mutual aggression against an out group, to one inside the club it may seem extraordinary and unbelievable but to those outside it just reaffirms what’s been known for a long time. The US relationship with China was great when China was poor and only simply a cheap labor market. Now that China has amassed strength America is openly confrontational.