| >this one event is worse than anything trump did or had happen during his administration. You're missing the obvious point (as the British, Russians and innumerable others found out) that Afghanistan is not a nation per se. It's a collection of regions, clans, families and warlords. We picked certain warlords (the enemies of the Taliban) when we went into Afghanistan and the ones we picked were/are just as insular, corrupt and narrowly focused on their own interests as those who support the Taliban. We spent 20 years and a trillion dollars "training" the Afghan military and police to support the Kabul government. And as anyone could have (and many did) told you, as soon as we left, the army and police just melted away and the Taliban took control. This isn't a surprise, nor is it unexpected. If Bush II, Obama or Trump had pulled out the troops the exact same thing would have happened. Now it's done and we can let the Afghans go back to killing and oppressing each other as they've done for millenia. It's not pretty, and many will suffer, but it's not our war and we should never have had any part of it, except to kick bin Laden out of there and make it clear to the Taliban that they need to make sure folks who want to attack the US don't ever take up residence in Afghanistan again. But instead we went with the failed strategies of the past (nation building) and the inevitable happened. It's not Biden's fault. It's not Trump's fault. This is all on Bush II. We should have gone in, kicked al Qaeda ass (we did), make sure the Taliban knew we would make them pay for supporting al Qaeda (we did, somewhat) and then went home. By the time Obama took office, we were completely entrenched in the corrupt regime in Kabul. tl;dr: This was never going to end well and it's about time someone had the guts to pull us out. Now the same folks who were in a lather about "Obama's forever war" are complaining that Biden ended it. Feh. It's just political posturing and bullshit. |
> And as anyone could have (and many did) told you, as soon as we left, the army and police just melted away and the Taliban took control.
I get the impression that one of the mistakes there may have been that the US was trying to train the Afghan military to use the "modern system" of warfare like the US (lots of training and high-tech gizmos), when they may have only been capable of the "static system." I don't know any actual details, but all the officials in US press conferences emphasizing how "well-equipped" the Afghan Army was gives me this impression.
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...