PBS: US Review of Chaotic Afghanistan Withdrawal Blames Trump
U.S. Withdrawal From Afghanistan: Report
The war in Afghanistan, a disastrous misadventure left over from the Bush Administration's incompetence, which cost the United States 2,459 lives, and 20,769 wounded service men and women, should have never happened. One of several demonstrations of the unbelievable incompetence of George W. Bush in foreign policy, part of his "nation building strategy" that failed miserably, the initial attack on Afghanistan was for the purpose of finding and getting rid of Osama Bin Laden.
He was never in Iraq, nor were the alleged "weapons of mass destruction" that were the aim of a misguided, and futile, attack on that country. There are those who say that, in spite of its futility, removing Saddam Hussein from power was worth the trouble. Looking at the aftermath, which included the rampage of ISIS, the destruction of large swaths of Syria and Kurdistan, and the almost complete wipeout of the few Orthodox Christians left in that part of the world, I say it wasn't worth it.
The practice of Republican "kicking the can down the road" when it came to these disastrous, expensive, futile efforts at nation building was classic Bush. And so, the job of extracting the United States from a costly and deadly occupation in Iraq fell to President Obama, as did the task of holding back the Taliban in Afghanistan in order to pursue Bin Laden. Of course, President Obama being a far more competent leader, succeeded in bringing Bin Laden to justice, where Bush failed.
At that point, from my own perspective, I wish President Obama had followed the advice of his Vice President and removed the US presence from Afghanistan, as he did from Iraq. I understand his desire to make the effort to continue to prop up the flailing, corrupt Afghan government, and give democracy there a chance, but the Afghan army was not capable, and perhaps not very willing, either, to hold off the advance of the Taliban. Democracy in such an anarchic and radically Islamic country never stood a chance. It was never going to work, and President Obama should have pulled the plug.
Trump, naturally and eagerly threw himself at the Taliban dictatorship. These were his kind of people and he relished the thought of being able to undermine the democratically elected government and hand the country over to the Taliban. Of course, he needed to delay long enough to see if there was some way for him to extract money out of the situation before pulling the rug out from underneath the elected government and giving the country back to a cruel dictatorship and he wasn't capable of understanding the military realities and logistics involved in evacuating literally hundreds of thousands of people from the certain death and execution that would be visited on them if they were caught and left behind. His withdrawal plan was a disaster and a failure.
Fortunately, he was succeeded by a competent and seasoned President who had wanted to get us out of Afghanistan all along. But as the reports indicate, Trump had squandered the necessary time and the necessary territory to bring this to a peaceful and orderly resolution. Under the circumstances, what our military under Biden's leadership achieved was nothing short of a miracle. The loss of life, which President Biden had anticipated and developed plans to keep at as much of a minimum as possible, was quite low under the circumstances.
The Biden Administration executed the withdrawal that can be described as being in spite of the flaws and lack of adequate planning or consideration that was part of the sloppy and incompetent work of his predecessor. So little consideration had been given to Trump's plan that most of what happened during the withdrawal depended on fast action in the moment. And as you read the report, you see, Biden left what turned out to be on the spot, emergency planning to his military experts, who managed to carry it out with as little loss of life and as few people left behind as could be expected in spite of Trump's interference and incompetence.
The end result is that the United States is finally out of Bush's Afghanistan disaster. We airlifted over 100,000 people out of danger in a matter of a few short weeks.
It's hard to imagine how much of a disaster that would have been had Trump been in charge. His habit of claiming to be the only expert and demanding his orders be followed would have resulted in the unnecessary loss of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American troops and tens of thousands of Afghan and American civilians who would have been left behind. His own military advisors have said as much and we know from experience and observation.
Of course, he preferred the Taliban win over democracy. Not that Afghanistan's democratically elected government was effective or capable of actually governing the country, which was not suited in any way for democracy, but Trump gravitates to dictatorships. He knows how to hand dictators all of the advantages, and he gave them like candy to the Taliban, in the same way he did to Kim Jong Un, in North Korea and Putin in Russia. Birds of a feather, so to speak.
We don't need more proof of Trump's lack of patriotism, or of his incompetence. He put the cherry on top of his disdain and disrespect for America's military by the disrespect and disregard he showed toward one of our most sacred monuments to their service by desecrating the Arlington National Cemetery. Republicans may continue to love their America-hating, dictator-loving, anti-Patriotic nominee for the Presidency, but continuing support for him only shows us that they are as bad as he is.
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