"Conventional US combat arms units usually served as battlespace owners" is a euphemism, the reality is conventional troops in Afghan difficult to operate oustside the base even during the day, after 2006.
The amount of security US battlespace owners achieved in Afghanistan varied over time and space.
Much of it depended on whether the local warlords and tribal leaders, at any given moment, preferred the US backed government in Kabul or a faction thereof, the Taliban or a faction thereof, or some other alternative.
Inevitably, the US got tired of trying to buy off certain Afghan elites while trying to blow up other Afghan elites, and just left the country.
Restrepo and The Hornet's Nest both document the plight of US infantry well.
One thing to keep in mind is that while documentaries like
Restrepo and
The Hornet's Nest can be reasonably accurate, they're inevitably snapshots captured by journalists drawn to the most exciting parts of Afghanistan.
While these parts offered compelling stories, they were inevitably also some of the most violent, contested and inhospitable corners of Afghanistan, and were not representative of the country or the conflict at large.
To put it succinctly: fighting against US forces were
usually visibly less intense, in most of Afghanistan, than what these documentaries captured, and that was sufficient to convince Uncle Sam to call it quits after ~20 years.
After 2010, only SOF is capable of conducting attack missions at night, conventional units are basically stuck in bases and outposts, pretend they still control the surrounding area. The situation of the US troops in Iraq during the same period was not much better.
The other thing is that the American public does not have much of an appetite for military casualties.
As a result, US commanders are relatively risk averse, and tend to avoid relatively riskier ground operations unless they're granted a host of CAS, ISR and CASEVAC assets to mitigate would be threats and address potential contingencies.
However, there were only so many F-16s, AH-64s, MQ-9s and so on and so forth to go around in Afghanistan; and a disproportionate amount of those assets went to JSOC strike teams that primarily conducted manhunting operations at night.
Inevitably, between the limited pre-deployment night training, and a lack of consistent access to requisite airborne assets, conventional US forces in Afghanistan rarely exited the wire to pick fights after sunset.
