western civilization in a ME Muslim nation, but I think people are being too hard on him and on his daring to give a different viewpoint. We don't wait for pundits tell us what to say and then all "think" and say it. And we should be able to examine honest criticism honestly.
Right or wrong in whether we should have held Afghanistan to control Muslim aggression and terrorism, it's not as if Engel doesn't know a very great deal about the region and Islam. And, above all for me, he believes in western liberal rights and principles, and his grief for having them snatched away from those in Afghanistan who shared them is real. And admirable. We can be glad to end this occupation and not be outraged to learn that a person like Engel feels it was wrong and mistaken, and potentially disastrous.
His view about what this means for power in the ME was grim. That "hole" filled by religious Muslim extremists. Obama didn't just want out of Afghanistan, he wanted to reduce our involvement in the whole ME to a minimum necessary given its constant problems. What does come next? We already have much of Islam engaging in religious war against us, we certainly don't want it ramped up, encouraged by China and Russia.
Civilization? Not strange that a believer in liberal principles grieves for what's going to happen to people he's actually met and known. I like to think the advance of ideas that's changing the whole world, including Islam -- and even Afghanistan -- is much bigger and a far more powerful force for change than our presence there. That the humanitarian changes during our time there reflected its power far more than ours and will ultimately defeat Islamic extremism. Unrealistic and irrelevant to current problems? Not for another century anyway?
On the 16th, with Kabul's government collapsing as suddenly as those condos in Florida, Engel said he was only surprised that others were claiming to be surprised, that people knew two or three months before that it would happen in Kabul, that he himself estimated it would happen right around when it did, that people had been seeing the Taliban take territory without having to fight for it "months ago." And that Kabul's own security forces were stripping off their uniforms to look more like Taliban ahead of the Taliban's arrival.
Obama said we needed to end the occupation, tRump effectively surrendered long before he did more officially at Doha, and Biden had long promised to get us out. Meanwhile Taliban had been advancing control over large areas of the country for years. Were people really as unbelieving that we'd leave as Engel said?
Since Engel believes strongly that we should have stayed, what does he believe that would have taken and for how long? We can't control our own RW; aside from their Taliban, how do the rest of Afghanistan's conservatives feel about us? He knows, and I'd like more of the conversation he started.
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