Liz Cheney blames Trump, yet her father and GWB went into Iraq diverting resources from Afghanistan. What did her father’s Administration accomplish with when they were in control?
There were never any good options in Afghanistan, and the reason is Pakistan. We have allowed Pakistan to operate around the edges of Islamic fundamentalism for forty years now, and rewarded it with full benefits of membership in the international community. They fund the Taliban and without Pakistan’s support they could easily have been neutralized.
They even took in bin Laden, lied to us (so the story goes) and housed him in their equivalent of Quantico (Abbottabad is a military enclave that is a suburb of the capital city of Pakistan, Islamabad).
Bin Laden (again, so the story goes) was only in Afghanistan briefly after 9/11 and escaped during the fighting in the winter of 2001-02. It appears that he was in that safe house in Pakistan for most of the time we were fruitlessly trying to build up a sustainable moderate government in Kabul.
This has been basically a comedy of errors with facts that are not necessarily truths. But if anyone thought they could build a moderate democracy in Afghanistan, well, it wasn’t possible in Iraq, perhaps a better prospect, so why would anyone think they could do that in Afghanistan. The place will never be anything but either a corrupt hell-hole or a nightmare seventh century thug state.