08-19-2021, 10:57 PM
(08-19-2021, 09:25 PM)Matt_Crimson Wrote: I'd say that depends on what one considers a botched exit.
What if we had attempted to evacuate all of the people we're trying to evacuate now from the beginning instead of getting our troops out of there first and then going "Oh shit, we need to go back and save those guys". I wouldn't consider that a botched exit assuming we actually had the necessary set up for such evacuations..... namely having boots on the ground.
What if while we had control, we had checkpoints instead of the Taliban?
What if we still had control of our weapons until we got everyone out instead of the Taliban?
Now we don't have control, we're rushing back to save people, and the Taliban is apparently escorting people we should have been escorting from the beginning.
In other words, a non botched exit seems like it would have been much more likely had we simply kept control until we got everyone out.
I think that the thing that prevented a mass evacuation of that scale was the need to sell what we've done over there for 2 decades as even remotely sustainable without occupation. A plan like that basically admits that the government and military you've invested lives and treasure building for a really long time has zero chance of staying upright at any hint of an absence of US support. I'm not even talking about selling it to American voters. That means nothing. I'm talking about having to admit to Afghans you've been pumping full of western ideals for 20 years that everything we tried to build was for naught and if you don't get in that airplane, the Taliban is going to kill/torture you and your family in short order.
Control the guns? So we are supposed to take the only chance our trained Afghan govt had vs the Taliban when they inevitably took the country back? Support a regime for as long as we did and then just take their means of defense on the way out? I doubt that helps.
Any gradual withdrawal just gives the Taliban time to plan. They already read the tea leaves and made short work of any resistance (read none) in a matter of hours. That's been cooked into the books ever since they became negotiating partners and were released from captivity.
Honestly, I think the only good optic was to stay there more or less forever. We broke it, we bought it. An American backed government never had a chance without American military might backing it. Keep it under realtive control, provide a way to montior terrorist activity, and forget any high minded ideas about them running it without us. Fear rules in those kinds of places. For 20 years, they had the US military to fear. With that threat removed, now they fear the Taliban. It's probably not something the average Afghan had to think about for very long before deciding who was in charge.
