Biden Was Right

[Nevilledog]

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Adrienne LaFrance
@AdrienneLaF
Really interesting perspective, and matches what I'm hearing from some military friends. One put it to me this way: America could have stayed there for 120 years and this still would have happened when we left.

Biden Was Right
The president made a difficult but necessary choice.
theatlantic.com
10:51 AM · Aug 16, 2021

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/biden-afghanistan-taliban-reality/619776/


In 2017, I arrived at Kabul’s 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 Afghanistan’s 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 Biden’s 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.

Various critics of President Biden are engaging in fantasies amid Kabul’s collapse: if only we’d used more force, demonstrated more will, stayed a few months longer, then the Taliban would have adopted a different strategy. John Allen, a retired Marine general and former commander of forces in Afghanistan, argued last week that Biden “should issue a public redline” and that “just this announcement will help the Afghan government and give the Taliban pause.” Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, was sharply critical of the withdrawal of the last 3,500 troops. Fred Kagan, of the American Enterprise Institute, argued that “keeping American military forces in Afghanistan indefinitely” would be “worth it.”

*snip*

[TheRealNorth]

1. The same assholes....

That refuse to raise taxes to pay for the war are the ones complaining. I don't give a rat's wet fart about what anyone from AEI thinks. They are helping legitimize the 1/6 coup attempt here in this country.

[highplainsdem]

2. K&R