Afghanistan Exit Debacle: Whose Fault?

I don't know enough to draw any firm conclusion. I doubt many people do. I suppose we'll know eventually. The Trump administration made some sort of deal. I wasn't paying enough attention to know whether it was good or bad. I expect that's true of even the vast majority of news junkies. All I really had was a fairly vague conclusion I'd come to a year or two ago: that we needed to actually, really, seriously move toward an exit in the not-terribly-distant future. The only reason I had for that view was that the two parties were playing politics with the decision, and that needed to stop. When either party started seriously talking about leaving, basically citing the futility of the project, the other one would simply articulate the reasons against such a move. Then, when power shifted, the parties would switch sides. Since there were clear reasons for staying, and clear reasons for leaving, and each party only articulated one side of the argument as convenient--usually when eyeing the political payoff that would accrue to the party that got us out--well, that seemed like a blueprint for disaster. 

   The Trumpistas made a deal with the Taliban. Seems like that didn't go so well. Biden extended the deadline for getting out, which basically sounds like the right move now (though making 9/11 the exit date was dumb). I wasn't paying enough attention, however, to know that we were down to 2500 troops, and casualties had been so radically reduced. 

   It did seem to me that we should reassess when the Taliban started blitzkrieging across the country... If they were going to come out in the open, it seemed to me that we ought to take advantage of that. And, of course: try to stop them when the problem became urgent rather than interminably ongoing.

   Again, I wasn't paying enough attention to realize how many American civilians were still in Kabul. At least we should--it seems--have prevented Kabul from falling until we had at least our people out. And that's not even to mention our Afghan allies.

   But, again, that's undoubtedly easier said than done. I imagine large columns of Taliban barreling down dusty quasi-highways, with no civilians in sight... Just send in the A-10s and Apaches! Just wipe 'em out! Ignorance makes everything seem easy.

   Of course the party in power always tries to blame the other guys, arguing that they inherited the disaster from them. Of course the other party always deploys the It Happened On Your Watch argument. It's often unclear who's right--as it is now. Biden did make the most recent bad decisions, however. That matters.

   The fact that even the MSM is revealing a willingness to attribute significant blame to Biden, however, is significant. 

   Politically, I'm happy to see Biden and the Dems further weakened. Too bad the nation has to pay such a high price in the process. I want him weakened enough to throw at least one branch of Congress back to the Pubs next year. Even better would be to see the Dems so weakened that they can't continue to push their radical agenda through in the interim. I'd like to see the administration so discredited that, say, DeSantis can win in a landslide in '24...but not so weakened that Trump can't resist coming back. Speaking purely politically, it doesn't matter whether this is really Biden's fault--so long as he gets blamed for it. I don't like thinking like that. But that's a measure of what desperate straits we're in.

   What I most fear right now is mass murders of U.S. personnel and Afghan allies in Kabul. Or a mass hostage crisis. This is already way too much like Jimmy Carter 2.0 without that too.

   What a mess.