>> It’s impossible to know what would have happened in a Trump second term
Unlikely a complete withdrawal.
I humbly disagree with the author.
His treatise pretends (1) we did everything right that we could do, (2) we did nothing wrong, made no mistakes, mo policy errors, always had the right objectives and (3) we - the U.S. - in no way helped create the conditions we have today. I think that sort of thinking is false.
Let me propose Rambo VI
Osama bin Laden was very likely out of Afghanistan by late 2005. What were we doing?
And we’re going to save these people from fight-to-the-death Taliban?
A training officer told me of having to teach recruits how to drive a humvee. He told them to mount up. They stood there, not moving. Comes to find out most of them had never been in any vehicle and did not know how to open the vehicle doors.
A very few are trainable to some degree, but even fewer could do basic weapon maintenance, very few could read, and most had no motivation to fight.
Hopeless, we should have left after UBL was killed.
Doomed from the start? Not even the Bush crowd left civilians by the 10s of thousands and billions worth of weapons behind
Stop
It is a fact of war that war doesn’t end until the enemy says it does. Until the enemy quits.
The Taliban can’t quit, they have nothing else to do and are stuck in a warrior cult.
What is coming to light is that the Taliban created a “backdoor” to most of the Afghan Division and Corps commanders and HQ staff months ago. They were bribed to surrender their troops and did so.
You accept the Taliban gold or you get the Taliban lead.......
The Biden regime’s grave miscalculation – the termination of the “Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau” within the State Department – likely endangered the lives of thousands of American attempting to evacuate the war-torn country. - https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/trump-blasts-bidens-afghanistan-miscalculation/
Let’s stop trying to fix everyone, and just worry about containing them. Complex forms of government requiring civic participation is beyond a country with a mean IQ of less than 90. Afghans will be living the same way 100 years from now as they were 100 years ago.
There are two distinct concepts talked about lately as if they are tied together. They are not. First, whether the United States should have been there that long can be debated. It was probably a waste of men and material.
However, the second concept, declaring the mission over and getting out, is not part of the first. The way Biden quit will always be beyond human comprehension, if corrupt motivations can be ruled out. I don’t think they can, and I think he did it for China’s benefit.
So What Went Wrong?
The end game in Afghanistan proves the reality that the guys in utilities create the environment for winning a war, but then the folks in suits have to secure the final victory. Mao Tse-tung, echoing Sun Tzu, said “It can therefore be said that politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed”. War and politics reside on a continuum.
War and diplomacy are not a dichotomy. Paraphrasing Sun Tzu says that war carried on by the State Department as covert conflict invests and surrounds traditional diplomacy with the force to bring meaningful change by frustrating plans, causing dissension, breaking alliances, isolating factions/regimes, and engaging the enemy’s mind with scenarios where war by the Defense Department as overt conflict becomes the ultimate arbiter.
Once again politicians and their acolytes in the State Department failed to respond to this reality, thereby disregarding the sacrifices of our armed forces, which had created and maintained an environment for victory for so many years. Even after they were given two decades to develop meaningful, intelligent policies they have profoundly failed.