bendog
Diamond Member
Well, Biden could have chosen to reneg on Trump's deal with the Taliban, and maintain Bagram and bomb the crap out of the Taliban to buck up the Afghan Army even with a few thousand troops. But our sons and daughters would have died. And we'd have further killed the dollar. Some trump supporters now seem to favor that. But even Tom "pickin" Cotton was for the pullout.The reduction to 2500 came on Jan 15 2021. Forcing the incoming administration to either trust the Afghan Army to fight the Taliban or redeploy 10's of thousands of our troops back into the country.
The thing Biden didn't expect, and so far as I know Trump never offered a view on when he was still president, was how the entire Aghan govt - army pols police everything - would just disappear the very day that American troops started loading up to leave. Neither Biden nor Trump were very consistent on how many "helpers" we'd take with us. Biden's "immigration" plan is already a dem disaster pending in border states.
I'm not terribly sympathetic towards the Afghans. If the "helpers" were really committed, the Taliban wouldn't be running Kabul today, imo. Biden was gonna get hammered on that. But the military managed to get 200k out. And the reality is a maj of Afghans would like to leave. And anyone who sees evidence that nation building was working is crazy or lying.
And as Mac1958 has been posting, Americans havn't given a shit. The issues are the economy, covid, schools, infrastructure, the border .... afghan only mattered to the families of the soldiers .... until it became political fodder. Biden ended the damn war.