The top U.S. general in Afghanistan during the American military’s 2021 withdrawal repeatedly warned Washington that security would get “very bad, very fast” after troops departed, but the Biden administration still failed to grasp the danger in keeping its embassy open with only nominal protection, he told lawmakers investigating the war’s deadly endgame.
Again? Aside from a lone suicide bomber, the withdrawal proceeded remarkably smoothly after a single half (½) day of chaos at the start. The embassy, in particular, was fine, and performed heroically throughout the entire time—something the State Department has long deserved more credit for. In the end, we evacuated more than 100,000 people under the most stressful conditions imaginable.
The Biden administration deserves credit for staying the course and finally getting us out of Afghanistan. The military deserves credit for implementing a massive evacuation plan and executing it well. The State Department deserves credit for staying open at the airport and risking their lives to process papers for a huge number of evacuees.
Republicans in Congress, by contrast, deserve nothing but jeers for continuing to try to find somebody to blame for those CNN pictures on August 16 that lasted for a grand total of about four hours. As usual, they should be ashamed of themselves, but they aren't.
++ ∞ (The US military lost more people in training accidents in 2023 than in the Afghan exit.) Best Wishes, wherever you are, Traveller
Biden evacuated over 100,000 people from Afghanistan after Trump surrendered to the Taliban without bothering to consult our Afghan allies.
Ford evacuated 7,000 people from Vietnam. That’s the Republican mark to measure against.
(And Republicans were fighting for a Muslim refugee ban—at the same time they blamed Democrats for not evacuating enough Muslim refugees. The Republican Party is a cynical disgrace.)
Agreed. It was a Dunkirk 2.0. Excuse my enlisted vulgarity - it was a fucking miracle manifested by fucking magnificent people on the ground and in the air and on the sea.
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I haven't read the article from the Post. Just wondering if they threw in something like - President Biden "squandered" the opportunity that Trump left him when he signed the withdrawal agreement the previous year that should have made this so easy to do.
Might as well go full MAGA.
I suspect it's hopeless to expect our national press and pundit class to ever give ink and pixels to anything positive about Joe Biden.
Hell, he could simultaneously cure cancer, make all newborn babies totally healthy, and end all strokes and heart attacks -- and all we'd see from the news is something like "Biden Fails to End Toenail Fungus."
Was it LBJ who said something about being able to walk across the Potomac yet still get criticized for not swimming?
I think it was Jesse Jackson who said it, comparing himself to Jesus walking on the water.
I'm pretty sure President Barack Obama also noted that "If I walked on the water across the Potomac, they'd say it was because I couldn't swim."
I think he said that the headlines next day would read "Obama Can't Swim"
People act as if the choice Biden faced was a chaotic withdrawal and leaving thousands of Afghans who had helped the coalition to the (non)mercies of the Taliban or just, like, staying and finally securing enduring peace and stability, which was only, like, six months away or something. Trump made a deal with the Taliban, namely that we were getting out. The choice was between 1. getting out and 2. sending tens of thousands of troops back in and starting another hot war with the Taliban which I'm sure would have gone great, just as it had gone great for the previous 20 years and however many flag-draped caskets and hundreds of billions poured down the drain.
If abandoning Afghanistan was wrong, that was on Trump. The decision not to ramp up yet another futile war there and get hundreds, if not thousands, more US soldiers and marines killed, was Biden's and it was the right call. I feel bad, as we all do, for the Afghan people, but they were fucked over by their own corrupt, incompetent government and military, not the US.
And you didn't even mention that Trump had 5,000 Taliban soldiers released from captivity. Staying would mean fighting them - AGAIN.
Good reminder! And let's emphasize that Trump didn't involve the actual Afghan government in any of his discussions.
And that’s what he intends to do with Ukraine.
Funnily, that also seems to be the extreme Lefty position: that the whole thing is between the US and Russia, and (so the orthodoxy goes) Ukrainians don't want to fight, have no aspirations of independence, are desperately wanting to surrender, but the US "won't let them."
All evidence to the contrary, of course.
Are they even left, if they lift no fingers to help leftish causes?
Thousands of Afghans who betrayed their nation and helped the coalition kill the fighters against the invaders and any civilians associated with them were allowed to bring their disloyalty to America and welcomed by liberals.
They did not betray their nation, they betrayed the Taliban, and if you wish, snuggle up to them.
Not sure what 'loyalty' means when their votes and voices weren't counted by the religionists with the guns.
But this dualism - the GOP screaming about Dem failures and Dems finding some sugar in the lemon and moving on, or the other way around - is one of the things that makes the US fail so often abroad. Translating everything into domestic policy will never give good foreign policy. I was opposed from the start to the occupation of Afghanistan and later against the suddenness of the withdrawal. But most of all to how the US didn't listen to people who knew the land, except warlords and corrupt officials by whom it was played. Not that I know it well, having spent only a month there decades ago, but even I knew about the rural/urban divide and yet interconnectivity of Afghanistan.
I think that to frame Biden's decision as "stay everywhere or get out altogether" is to shut out all alternative paths, like just holding Kabul, Herat and Mazar-al-Sharif and letting progress seep out from there the natural and slow way. (I said this before and it was sneered the Taliban would just isolate those cities, but that's not how it works and I saw it with my own eyes in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, during the civil war there.) How the US treated the Afghan countryside, shooting up villagers here and building girls' schools there, wasn't the only possible option. And that got lost in the "stay the course or get out" debate and thus no lessons were learned at all.
I friend of mine was arguing (mostly parroting RepubliQans). I stopped him mid-sentence and said - Wait, WHAT? Biden got us OUT of Afghanistan? Good for him. Now, what were you saying?
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Agreed. That's a great way to handle it.
" is to shut out all alternative paths, like just holding Kabul, Herat and Mazar-al-Sharif and letting progress seep out from there the natural and slow way.
As if the Taliban are just going to let you do that. How do you keep these cities supplied and fed if you're just going to cut yourself off from the rest of a landlocked country, hmm? Especially when the enemy has Stinger missiles you've trained him to use to shoot down heavy aircraft? Or how do you keep them infiltrating these very cities with their fighters and suicide bombers?
One thing that you and many others have seem to have forgotten: the Taliban had double agents stationed in government posts throughout the country which allowed them easy access to such cities when the time came for their big offensive. Thus it was rare that major battles took place because these same agents arranged for surrenders to take place and thus government forces collapsed rapidly. This, often times, is the Afghan way of war, instead of fire fights you negotiate deals among fellow tribesmen.
The only major difference between administrations was Trump's plan to basically hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban officially, without any fight at all, through a peace treaty. The U.S. might have stayed on but only under a Taliban or heavily pro-Taliban regime, the Afghan government be damned because they played absolutely no part in the negotiations. Biden wanted out too, but by making the pretense of having the Afghan government of that time fight the Taliban to stay in power, the U.S. had suffer the indignity of watching its client state collapse like South Vietnam did. In other words, Biden had to bite the bullet that Trump refused to because that was the situation he inherited. And as bad as things were, any contingency planning to bugout beforehand as the situation deteriorated would have been leaked and the outcome would be even worse if that's was even possible. And as bad as things were with a tragic loss of life, to get 150,000 people out was damn miracle.
The sad thing is, by doing the right thing, Biden's popularity took a direct hit and has never recovered (and may never recover.) I imagine the same was true for Gerald Ford after the fall of Saigon (although the Nixon pardon was just as damaging but one wonders if Reagan would have run against Ford for the GOP nomination if Saigon hadn't fallen?). Yet in both cases, the same thing is true: The U.S can't fight someone else's war for it. If a nation and a people don't believe in themselves or what they're fighting for, all million-dollar equipment in the world won't prevent defeat. And catering and protecting a bunch of elites in Kabul and other big cities who showed no desire to defend themselves, their government, their ideals, you name it, is no alternative strategy at all.
First, you misstate me about "protecting a bunch of elites in Kabul and other big cities who showed no desire to defend themselves". A lot of progress was achieved at enormous cost, not primarily to help the elites, and thrown away. Second, you assume the Taliban would attack the cities and risk throwing away what they got, control of rural areas, and that they'd blockade the cities their own "constituents" need. A kind of West-Berlin. Having lived 20 years in Asia I doubt that's what would have happened. In any case it might have been tried. Third, I didn't say holding the cities was the only third option but that the US for once should have listened to people who know a country well. I read many articles with sensible proposals by such people.
I did not "forget" the Taliban had double agents staged all over the place. It's not what really happened. They had contacts, that's the Afghan way, and they played it that way and the US didn't because they weren't aware of what the Afghan way was.
But most of all you do what I critique: see foreign policy through the eyes of domestic policy. I know Trump did a bad job. It's not the point.
You have no idea about the logistical problems involved with holding three cities. For one thing, you can't just defend that cities. The only method of resupply is through the air. The Mazar-i-Sharif airport is about 4 kilometers from the city. In Kabul, it's 8 km. In Herat, it's 11. The defensive perimeter would need to expand that far. All three airports have just a single runway and would struggle to handle this volume, as they did the two times that Pakistan closed the land resupply routes.
About 85% of the total NATO supplies came by land route, either through Pakistan or multiple Central Asian countries. These supplies were shipped by sea, to Karachi on the Pakistan routes, and either Riga, Latvia or Poti, Georgia and then hauled by train to the Afghan border.
Supplying forces exclusively through the air is expensive, inefficient, and dangerous. The transport planes are extremely vulnerable, especially during takeoff and landing, which would require expanding the perimeter eve further to push the Taliban outside MANPAD range. (And you're deluded if you think that the Taliban wouldn't keep fighting until we were gone completely.)
There are other problems with such a limited occupation, but the logistics alone are sufficient to make it a terrible idea.
"And as bad as things were, any contingency planning to bugout beforehand as the situation deteriorated would have been leaked and the outcome would be even worse if that's was even possible."
This is the part that is never addressed by the critics. As the general who testified says at the end of the WaPo:
“If you start pulling people out,” he asked, “do you precipitate the crisis?”
Exactly. Mass panic with refugees clogging roads and soldiers throwing down their weapons and running for the exits (which is what happened in 'Nam in the spring of '75 during the middle of the NVA offensive) is not an exit strategy. Thank God that didn't happen in Afghanistan until they very end and not to the same extent.
How do you 'just hold Kabul' without ending up randomly shooting at people not in Kabul?
You make it clear you will hold Kabul and settle into a kind of arranged coexistence. I don't think it could be done in Kandahar and that's why I didn't mention that city. But Kabul was traditionally different from the rest of Afghanistan. It wouldn't be a real rupture. Mazar-al-Sharif with its majority Tajik and Uzbek population was not natural Taliban territory. Nor mostly Persian-speaking Herat, which Iran too probably didn't want to see in Taliban hands. But that's a broad brush and I don't know the country well. Others do and I think with their help local dealmaking, rather than national, might have worked.
The Taliban weren't interested in making deals. They knew they had won and were willing to wait for us to leave. If we had tried to stay, then they would have gone to other options. Like car bombs and suicide bombers.
That uhh, does not sound realistic. "Make clear"? How? To who? In the context of our dear leader saying we're leaving months early?
Hold the cities? You mean the Russian plan?
Kevin, I completely agree with you on this matter.
I constantly find I have to defend Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan to idiots who don't understand anything about the country.
The real harm from our withdrawal was not to 'security,' but to the girls who live in Afghanistan. But their future was always doomed without an invading force protecting their rights.
In the end, we evacuated more than 100,000 people under the most stressful conditions imaginable.
It was the largest airborne evacuation in military history. As such it was remarkably light in terms of US casualties.
Really shoddy journalism on the part of WaPo. The key verbs in that excerpt—"warn" and "told" — convey an unjustified quality of neutrality or consensus as to the facts. Sure, Miller is a bonafide expert on the topic in question, but it's highly unlikely he's pristinely objective about that situation, and, needless to say, his take is far from universally shared. The article should have been written in such a way as to make that clear.
The top U.S. general in Afghanistan during the American military’s 2021 withdrawal repeatedly warned Washington that security would get “very bad, very fast” after troops departed, but the Biden administration still failed to grasp the danger in keeping its embassy open with only nominal protection, he told lawmakers investigating the war’s deadly endgame.
A fairer wording would be something along the lines of:
The general issued a "cover your ass" statement.
The sentences do seem to lack a description of how Biden failed to protect the embassy.
That was a classic switch to "passive voice", which should always raise an alarm.
The sentences do seem to lack a description of how Biden failed to protect the embassy.
I'm not sure I follow you, but the contention that "Biden failed to protect the embassy" is just that, a claim, hence my use of "alleging."
But then there'd be no controversy for the journalism profession, which has an innate desire to be admired and envied by everyone and therefore must play the Both Sides and Neutral Journo Here cards as much as they can. It's just another form of groveling, and it's disgusting.
WaPo is permanently tarnished by its ownership by Bezos. He, like all tech-bro billionaires benefits when Washington is consumed with partisan warfare, leaving it no time to contemplate the complete oligarchization of the US economy.
There you have a complete explanation of The Post's willful ignorance.
His hand-picked choice to run the thing--fresh from Murdochland, and now dodging questions that he won't be able to dodge in court.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/wapo-boss-will-lewis-was-at-center-of-murdoch-cover-up-new-docs-claim?ref=author
So nobody deserves blame for abandoning tens of thousands of Afghans together with their families who trusted America's promises and fought on our behalf?
Is the idea that America's honor matters truly dead in the Democratic Party?
Don't feed the troll.
Yeah, just last week, MF was saying how evil Islam is. Also last week, defended a guy convicted of driving his car through a red light into pedestrians in a crosswalk, then shooting at the pedestrians, killing one.
Liar. I never said Islam is evil or defended someone "convicted of driving his car through a red light into pedestrians in a crosswalk, then shooting at the pedestrians, killing one"
Sure, the people, mostly in the GOP, who refused to let them immigrate and become citizens.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/12/20/afghan-adjustment-act-republicans/
There is a Senate bill now, S232, for this, but it has gone nowhere and in any event there is 0 chance it would pass the House.
Are you claiming that the Biden administration deliberately abandoned these people in Afghanistan when we left because they couldn't bring them to the US?
My understanding is we abandoned them because of an idiotic decision to withdraw and an incompetent withdrawal plan that deliberately did not prioritize getting people who were on our side out before we left due to an artificial and unreasonable deadline imposed by the Biden administration.
Are you claiming it was actually a deliberate decision to abandon these people?
Don't feed the troll.
Your either dumber than a fence post or a lying sack of shit so no one gives a fuck what you think
In short, you have no way to respond because the facts are obvious.
Yes, the facts are obvious, and you can't see them because you are a blinkered ideologue.
Your "understanding" is infantile. Afghans didn't "fight on our behalf". We fought on theirs, until it was obvious it was a fruitless effort.
Three questions I've never received a coherent answer to:
1. How many more Afghans should NATO have evacuated? (The implied answer during the evacuation was a constantly moving "x + tens of thousands", where x was the number that had actually been evacuated.)
2. How should these people have been indentified? Or to put it another way, who should have been evacuated and who should have been told they weren't eligible?
3. Where were these extra tens/hundreds of thousands of people supposed to be flown to?
We have more than enough space to take them, but your point otherwise stands.
The Afghans who fought on our side were fighting because asked them to, recruited them, organized their units, etc. They would not have been fighting if not for us and would not have been targetted by the Taliban if not for us.
We should have evacuated everyone in the ANA, who worked for the government, who was part of the civil society we promoted, or worked with foreign NGOs, etc. and their families. Probably hundreds of thousands of people. Quite a painful exercise. There is a high cost to abandoning a project like Afghanistan.
You fly those people to wherever you can immediately and then somewhere safe long term. Debts of honor must be paid.
Deranged bullshit. The idiocy of evacuating the Afghan army while it was heavily engaged fighting the Taliban speaks for itself.
Um, er, ah....Trunt negotiated the withdrawal timeline, got 5000 Taliban released from prison, and then dumped the stinking mess in Biden's lap, MoFo.
And so we should have done what, exactly?
Perhaps the third time's the charm. DON'T FEED THE TROLL. It isn't arguing in good faith: it just wants to feed off of your hatred, your disgust, your confusion, your decency. Deny it that.
People just can't help themselves, and, as a result, we got an utterly useless sub-thread of what, nine comments?
Sigh.
"the Trump administration agreed to remove all U.S. troops by May 2021."
And the Biden administration got an extension from the Taliban thru September 2021.
And the Taliban agreed to negotiate a deal with the government.
They did not keep their side so we had no obligation to keep our side.
I know what "MF" means. Please don't feed the troll.
...and do what, tho?
Yeah, I know MF was arguing that drivers should be allowed to shoot pedestrians who get upset at being threatened by a motor vehicle violating a crosswalk last week...
Of course you are lying.
I guess you must be a Biden supporter.
My knowledge of the military is very limited: however, I have a brother who was an officer in US Special Forces, including several tours in Afghanistan.
Based on my conversations with my brother, I believe withdrawing from Afghanistan was the correct decision. However, I also believe the exit process was poorly planned and executed.
The most material error was the sudden abandoning of Bagram Airforce base. This Airforce base was relatively easy to secure, had the infrastructure to sustain itself for an extended period, and could have allowed for a much more orderly exit. We could have housed, vetted and flown out whoever we wanted, at a comfortable pace.
To be clear, no solution was perfect, but I believe a safer, and less abrupt exit was possible.
One problem with Bagram (from reading reports at the time) is that it is a bit over 39 miles from Kabul, through absolutely wonderful territory for ambushes. Most of the Afghanis we needed to get out were in and near Kabul.
DButch - I texted my brother your question and got
"yes, 39 miles sounds about right. Dangerous road. Would need MRAP convoys and helicopters. But once in Bagram, everyone can be safely vetted and transported. You would need, maybe 3,000 PMC and military to run Bagram. There was not need for the exit plan we used and the losses of life were predictable."
Every family killed in an ambush on the road would have been hung around Biden's neck and folks would be asking why he didn't just keep the airport in Kabul open instead of forcing refugees to go down a dangerous road. There were no perfect solutions. As it happened, our exit from Afghanistan was probably the safest and most successful large scale military withdrawal and evacuation in all of human history.
No kidding! And how the hell are those wanting to get out supposed to make their way to Bagram? Hitchhike? Make them pay through the nose to find transportation? Hmm? We were supposed to convoy people to Bagram? Do we have enough trucks and fuel for that?
And I love this "protect the embassy" crap. Nothing happened to the embassy! So what's the problem here?
Obviously if 13 U.S. soldiers didn't die because of a suicide bomber working for a terrorist organization that's opposed to the Taliban, I don't think we would be talking about. Just be grateful there weren't more.
I dunno, what's the taxi fare on an MRAP, how many were available to be pressed into service, and how many civilians can be carried per trip?
Then, with helicopter escorts, how many of those would be in serious danger of getting blown out of the air?
Military logisticians have to think about that!
No, no, motrd always knows the perfect solution to everything, which, sadly, Democrats never choose ... If only they would listen to him/her ....
I'll let Jim Hightower have the last word:
https://www.amazon.com/Theres-Nothing-Middle-Stripes-Armadillos/dp/0060929499
Good grief. It would have been easier to get 120,000 people in Kabul onto "MRAP convoys and helicopters" to travel to Bagram so they could fly out than it was to get them straight onto planes in Kabul? Makes no sense whatsoever. And that's without delving into subsidiary issues like where the Bagram hordes were supposed to be housed while they awaited their flights out, or how they were going to be fed.
When the Russians were at the stage of "Bagram and a few outposts", Bagram was under constant attack. It might have led to more casualties.
Would have, we have evidence of such in the past.
From the current replies, it sounds as if Bagram AFB would be easy to "defend" -- that is, to protect the American troops -- but hell for any Afghans or others who tried to reach it.
If so, this would pretty much contradict the whole purpose of using it for mass evacs.
Then the question is who did the planning and execution?
I doubt it was Biden.
President Biden, unlike TFG, has a lot of experience and happens to know that the US Government has lots of experienced logistics AND tactical experts for handling emergencies. He probably had one of his staffers call up the various agencies needed, and give them the outline of the situation and desired result, then stepped back and followed their progress reports.
President's staff then starts working on setting things up AND tracking progress to make sure things get done on time.
Your arguments are a non sequitur. If everyone knew exiting was dangerous, why did the Biden administration believe the embassy only required nominal protection?
Just saying.
...but they didn't have 'normal protection'.
What else should they have had? That seems missing.
Stepped up protection -- 2x or more armed personnel.
I think you missed this part.
I laugh at GOP sniping Biden leaving some interpreters behind, convienently forgetting that Biden went back for many while Bush/Cheney left ALL of theirs behind
This makes no sense. Bush/Cheney did not abandon Afghanistan. There was no need to get people on our side out while we were still occupying the country and propping up the friendly government.
Iraq. They refused to move threatened allies from Iraq to the US. The best they got was a plane to Germany.
Of course not.
How the heck are you going to win a war like Iraq if you remove the people on your side?
As long as the US stays in Iraq and keeps the country in reasonably good shape we should not be evacuating people. In the same way, we should not be providing asylum to ablebodied Ukrainians eligible for military service. They need to go home and kill Russians.
My post was not about who abandoned Afghanistan, it was about which administration abandoned the local interpreters we used. Nice pivot.
Bush/Cheney abandoned all our interpreters in Iraq, in spite of many of our own military leaders pleading for them to get the asylum they’d been promised and had earned. The administration’s excuse- The interpreters didn’t meet the “strict interpretation of the eligibility criteria for asylum “. A criteria conveniently not mentioned at the start or throughout the years these guys were losing family and friends while saving countless of our GIs.
The only Afghan interpreters Biden didn’t get out were the ones who couldn’t get to the embassy / airport. Even then we went back to get some of them.
And if anyone thinks hiring then abandoning locals who gave everything, was a just one time accidental failure and not consistent with Republican DNA, ask the Kurds, maybe the South Vietnamese too.
It is almost like the MSM can't wait for a Trump restoration. Biden is so BORING! Trump will be so much more FUN!
No “almost.”
Losing is always messy.
Retreats from Afghanistan seldom work as planned.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/The_Last_Stand%2C_by_William_Barnes_Wollen_%281898%29.jpg
So many graves...
There are several historical examples why Afghanistan is called the "Grave of Empires", from (at least) Alexander of Macedon through most recently the United States of America. The UK/British Empire had at least two stints, as noted in a couple of detective series, "Sherlock Holmes" (Doc Watson was a veteran, invallided out) and "Cormoran Strike" (ditto).
... and invading Afghanistan in the first place was only barely less stupid than invading Iraq.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction 64 reports in the course of the Afghan war. Mostly an accounting of nothing actually working the way it should, shifting strategy and tactics, then changing course and trying OTHER approachs. Bottom line - the last report (#64) was was published on April 30, 2024. Kind of a dismal post-mortem.
The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction also published a series of reports with the last one coming out on 9/24/2013. Also a dismal trail...
Bottom line is every mistake the U.S. made in Vietnam they made in Afghanistan too. Unfortunately the senior brass, many of whom served in 'Nam as junior officers, learned nothing other than not wanting to fight that kind of war or be involved in "national building" which is understandable. But unfortunately 9-11 made that impossible as far as Afghanistan was concerned.
My recollection is that the initial campaign was brilliantly done. It used a smattering of special forces type troops on the ground with some air support to aid a predominately Afghan force in routing the Taliban.
A few weeks later the old king showed up and called a loya gujarat, which is a meeting of the big men from around the country. Wonderful, I thought. We can dole out a few hundred million a year with a few strings attached to these people and get the fuck out while we are still heroes to them.
But no, the State Department and the high command and the Bush Administration were outraged at the king showing up. They sent him packing. Afghanistan was to be converted to a modern democratic state with a popularly elected leader of our choosing.
It worked out the way it always does. We never learn.
Do you think Afghanistan's mineral wealth had anything to do with US policy?
In the spirit of Monday Morning Quarterbacking, I recall reading several pieces that said chasing BinLaden in Afghanistan should have been done with Seals, Deltas, and Drones, not whole armies and divisions. Understandably turned down, as the mil-industrial complex (aka K-Street's biggest fan) wouldn't have made nearly as much money.
As for teaming up with Afghan local tribes, when we first comtemplated going there someone asked our CIA asset- "How much to buy an Afghan tribal leader?" He answered- "You can't buy them, but you can rent them for awhile"
The worst part of the American 'withdrawal' from Afghanistan in 2021 is the outcome of the British retreat from 1842 was not repeated.
Ahh, because having hundred thousand civilians should have died, wha?
I assume the general's observations were cherry-picked by journalists to bolster the "catastrophic withdrawal" narrative to which they committed back in 2021. Since the embassy never came under attack, it seems to me the decision to keep it open with "nominal protection" was 100% correct.
It's never been a secret that the Pentagon didn't want to leave Afghanistan. They resisted drawing troops down under Trump, they talked Biden into deferring the withdrawal date, and I bet they spent a lot of time dropping broad hints that they could have 20,000 troops back in the country any time he said the word. One more "surge" and the Taliban would be finished!
Exactly! What more should have they done for the embassy?
Will some of you at least TRY to read Kevin's article in full. A lot of the embassy personnel WERE DOING THEIR JOBS AT THE AIRPORT. Where in DOGS name would you expect them to be processing papers for an urgent evacuation in the turmoil that would be rolling into the city?
"Oh, you must go back to the US Embassy in Kabul, get your paperwork done up, then figure out how to get back to the airport and present the papers at the gate, with a lot of hostile players watching.
Anyone want to explain how "Dark Brandon" got any of that wrong?