“At this point, what difference does it make”? What diff does it make whether the embassy is lost today, tomorrow, a year from now, 5 or 10 years ago?
That the multiple-repetition-through-history lesson of Afghanistan being “where empires go to die” and is otherwise uncontrollable or ungovernable was somehow lost and ignored by our supposed best and brightest when the decision was made to invade is just rank stupidity. There is no plausible explanation, though certainly there is a lesson about the reliance upon so-called “experts”.
How a mission to kill Bin Laden as revenge for 9/11 morphed into a 20 year fruitless nation-building exercise is something I will never understand. If the mission was to kill Bin Laden, we shoulda gone in with 3-6 “dirty dozen” hunter-killer groups of the meanest bastards we could find and either find and kill him in 45 days, tops, and then leave. THAT, we could and probably would have done. THAT would have taught AQ whatever lesson was intended.
If it was (and is) so important for Al Queda to attack the US (and it is) and thus our response was to deny them Afg as a base, what was to prevent them from using 100-500 otherwise meaningless acres somewhere else in the vast Mideast as an alternate training base? Ans: nothing.
The only lesson from history that is older than the time-proven admonitions against screwing with Afghanistan is that getting people to change their religion is just about the hardest thing there is to do. To get Muslims to embrace democracy, which we think is noble and wonderful, is to simultaneously get them to renounce their religion and to abandon their mullahs or imams for a system they know nothing about, have had zero experience with, and don’t crave. Once again, how this impossible dynamic that could have been explained by any properly educated high-school student escaped our policy geniuses has no explanation. This isn’t hindsight: It was patently observable by multiple example then as it is now.
The number of people who will be killed in whatever the Taliban decide to inflict in the next news-and-outrage-reaction cycle is the same number who would have been killed along the last 20 years whether we were there or not. It is only a matter of how spread out in time (or not) the killings will be or would have been.
If the intention to exit Afg is the policy, then there should be NOTHING said about it. Just do the deed. Get the embassy staff and non-mil contractors out, destroy the sensitive docs, and in the last week, thermite the gear and get the military personnel out.
Should have let the Mossad do it. But noooooo. Dumbya had to use it as a convenient excuse to get back at the guy who tried to kill his daddy.
This post was never about Afghanistan, it was more about possible Tehran II and how we have been sold a false bag of good on how Biden was going to get us out of there. I believe that retreat will degenerate into complete embarrassment and only strength the reslove of our enemies worldwide.
ALL COMPLETELY CORRECT.
As for religion, the American Indian was not converted, he was executed and conquered. That is how you win wars.
Everything you have said will be forgotten and will be done again by the next generation of pointy headed “experts” but only IF this nation survives and I think it won’t.
We allowed Pakistan to evacuate Bin Laden and thousands of other terrorists by air!