Our NATO allies all knew the planned date for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan
They knew that Trump planned to pull out American forces in May, had he won reelection. They knew that Biden extended the date for final U.S. withdrawal until September. Just like the the United States, our NATO allies depended on support from Afghan nationals to help run their embassies and to interpret for their troops out in the field.
And just like the U.S. they are all still scrambling to get their citizens out of Afghanistan by August 31, along with thousands of Afghan nationals who worked alongside them in their efforts during the war. Nothing forced those nations to wait for America to begin mass evacuations before they started pulling their own nationals and friendly Afghans home. It was not just the United States that did not foresee Kabul falling to the Taliban before the scheduled U.S. exit from Afghanistan in September. If President Biden was "caught flat footed" by the sudden total collapse of Afghanistan's central government, so was the entire world.
The United States faced a unique hurdle in that the former Administration worked effectively for four years, until last January, to sabotage the ability of the United States to accept refugees from Afghanistan. But no cliche is more true than the one that says "hindsight is 20/20. I am damn impressed by the ongoing effort the Biden Administration is now orchestrating to pull what will almost certainly be upwards of 100,000 people out of an airport in Kabul while the entire nation surrounding it lies under the control of the forces we had been battling for over twenty years. It is a breathtaking military and diplomatic mission.
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