Josh Marshall on Kabul's fall "Vindication and the Fall of Kabul"
I tried to include four pertinent parts - it is worth reading it all. Marshall gets it.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/vindication-and-the-fall-of-kabul
"Yesterday I wrote this: “In the coming days or weeks we’re likely to see a situation in which the government only controls Kabul. If you’re in the Afghan army how hard are you going to fight in that final battle? Why fight? The question answers itself.”
As we can see this morning, not days or weeks but hours. Overnight in the United States the army and government of Afghanistan melted away and remaining authorities are in the process of turning over power to a transitional Taliban government. It’s over.
People are lining up to say that this is all on Joe Biden, that he “lost” Afghanistan, that he mismanaged or failed to manage the US withdrawal, that this is “on him”. In the calculus of US military-political culture that’s likely right. But I see it quite differently. This seems to me like the ultimate vindication of his decision.
snip
What we have seen over the last couple weeks shows decisively and irrefutably that the entire politico-military project in Afghanistan was an illusion. Lots of criticism from this or that person, look at what’s happened to everything we built, look what’s been squandered. But what you built was the Afghan state and the military. What we’re seeing here shows you built nothing. We built nothing. The Taliban haven’t so much conquered the post-2002 Afghan state as nudged it over. Asked it to step aside and it complied. There was simply nothing there.
snip
After Biden’s inauguration, Pentagon leaders reportedly told the new President that despite his desire to withdraw, it wasn’t the right time. The Taliban had been strengthened under Trump’s feckless management of US national security policy and effort to negotiate what amounted to a handover of the country to the Taliban. Maybe. But I doubt it. Trump’s foreign policy – to the extent one can call it that – was catastrophic. But I don’t buy efforts to put this on him. Like I said, there’s plenty of blame to go around. And those most to blame are, I think, more guilty of self-delusion than deceit.
big snip - last para
This is right. However ugly the denouement, Biden understood the reality of the situation better than his military advisors. He was and is more in line with US popular opinion which long ago soured on our perpetual occupation of Afghanistan. Whether they will reward him or punish him for following through on that judgment I can’t say. But the best way to ensure the former outcome is to be clear, direct: After 20 years it was up to the Afghans to decide their own future. This is a fight for Afghans not another generation of American boys. A perpetual deployment was not in the security interests of the United States.
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