The Atlantic: Biden was Right
The president made a difficult but necessary choice.
By Daniel Silverberg
In 2017, I arrived at Kabuls Hamid Karzai Airport as part of a congressional staff delegation. Even though the U.S. embassy stood a mere four miles away, safety concerns necessitated our helicoptering from a recently constructed multimillion-dollar transit facility instead of traveling by road. As we flew over Kabul, I realized that the Afghan security forces, backed by thousands of U.S. personnel, could not even secure the heart of Afghanistans capital.
Kabul was not lost yesterday; the United States and our Afghan partners never truly had control of the country, nor of its capital. Once the Taliban had secured an agreement that the United States would be pulling out and that forces would be reduced to minimal numbers before Joe Bidens presidency began, they merely had to wait.
The dozens of congressional briefings I attended over 14 years of working on Capitol Hill underscored this dynamic. The intelligence community would commence each briefing with a stark assessment regarding the fragility of conditions in Afghanistan. Senior defense leaders would then provide a far more optimistic view, one that often gave a sense of progress, despite the Herculean challenge with which they had been tasked.
...
Some critics also argue that the United States should have preserved a residual force in Afghanistan, much as we have in South Korea. There are any number of ungoverned spaces today, however, which pose as great a threat, if not greater, to U.S. security as Afghanistan, and few are calling for U.S. deployments to those areas. There is a costfinancial and militaryto tying forces down in a project that was ultimately doomed to fail.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/biden-afghanistan-taliban-reality/619776/
CentralMass
(15,265 posts)J_William_Ryan
(1,756 posts)The awful truth of Afghanistan is that it was a failed enterprise from the outset, a bad-faith contrivance of GWB seeking to ensure his reelection.
The notion of turning Afghanistan into another South Korea is as ridiculous as it is wrong the immediate withdraw of all US military was the only decision and the correct decision, however difficult, however tragic.
SunSeeker
(51,694 posts)DeeDeeNY
(3,356 posts)Doomed to failure from the start. Done for all the wrong reasons.
True Blue American
(17,988 posts)Too many sects and war lords, each fighting for their share of the spoils.
The US gravy train has been stopped.
CentralMass
(15,265 posts)The Taliban has assumed control of the country and they have opened the prisons and let out some Al-Qaida members who had been imprisoned. Will terrorist groups bent on causing harm in the region or in Europe or in the US be given sanctuary there ? The Taliban has already started contacting female journalists etc.
Will their rule and new security situation allow us to stay out ? This is an organic situation. Hopefully the past history of human rights violations and terrorist groups being allowed to operate with impunity from the country will not occur again.
samsingh
(17,601 posts)IronLionZion
(45,528 posts)because it never was defined clearly. The American people thought it was to fight the terrorists from 9/11, not to keep troops there for 2 decades, rebuild a failed state, destroy the Taliban, or anything like that.
The terrorists who hate America can be operating in other countries. In fact, Osama Bin Laden was found in neighboring Pakistan, 10 years after 9/11.
The Unmitigated Gall
(3,830 posts)And give Joe a little cover on this, given the Orange Shitweasels (the clod who actually signed the surrender documents) attacks, as well as Shrubs total silence on the shit-show he started.
XanaDUer2
(10,728 posts)deep sadness.
The Unmitigated Gall
(3,830 posts)Must be crying into his paint set. (Snark, directed at 43)