First, Dags, I never said women and children last so please dont put words in my mouth. I never said that.
Obviously, you believe that Biden is senile. You believe that before this withdrawal but I dont see any evidence that Biden is senile here. Withdrawals are messy and dont go well. But that doesnt mean the president is s senile. I think he was let down by the military, CIA, and perhaps state department.
As for Trump, I dont think it has been clearly reported about how bad of a deal this was. Of course, there was the release of 5,000 Taliban soldiers. But there is also the fact that Trump agreed for the US to check out of the war in February, 2020. We were not supposed to attack the Taliban and the Taliban was not supposed to attack us. The Taliban kept their word and I dont believe a single American soldier has been killed since then. But weve left the Afghan army on their own since February, 2020 and it was clear the Taliban was winning.
In reference to RJ's point the military suggested keeping 2,500 troops until we got everyone out. Well, first of all, was 2,500 enough? Before the agreement we had 10,000 troops. If we were going to start fighting again then 2,500 was not enough. 10,000 was not enough if the Afghan army was surrendering around us. But again to have a difference in the collapse we would have needed to break the agreement and engage with the Taliban again. And now we would be facing a hostile Taliban force.
It does seem that when the US military mostly withdrew most of the last 2,500 troops that seemed to have a negative psychological effect...or maybe it was just the Taliban's agreements with Afghan leaders only went into effect when we were clearly gone and couldnt change our minds. We vacated Bagram and other bases. The question is...why was our intelligence so very bad?
According to the WSJ as if June 23, 2020 the intelligence estimate was it was "possible" the Afghan government would fall in six months. Essentially, thst was the worst case scenario.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.co ... 1624466743Obviously, that was way off. I believe the Afghans knew the war was lost. We had not been fighting for almost 18 months because of that terrible Trump agreement. And so when we were finally gone they capitilated almost immediately. And the CIA had no idea those agreements had made. So what we could have done was escalated to 10,000 troops and just kept fighting. But that was not an option--Bden wanted to leave and it was a popular decision. To avoid an embarrassing exit we would have to have kept our bases and upped our troop levels until we got out Americans and Afghans we wanted out. Then in an orderly fashion had our military withdrew last. But only 2,500 with us already not fighting for 18 months the situation could deteriorate quickly. And what would those 2,500 troops have done if Kabul had been lost?
I just think there is a lot of monday morning quarterbacking about a very difficult situation Trump put us in. By the way, to show one example of how difficult it was the Afghans needed american mechanics to maintain some of their planes. What happens when we pull those mechanics out?
We should have kept fighting with the Afghans, possibly even pushed a little harder, kept our troop levels high, slowly withdrew civilian Americans and got Afghans out, and then quickly withdrew our military while the Afghan army had a good position. But drawing down our troops, not fighting for 18 months, letting the Taliban take control of most of the country while we tried to withdraw Americans and Afghans quickly...of course it was going to be bad. Such an agreement could only have been made by a traitor: Trump.