And it was hopeless to expect that. The primary criticism is that the administration was operating, and making critical decisions, under the assumption that the US-backed Afghan government would continue to exist. Either there was a catastrophic intelligence failure, or the administration was historically incompetent. The Biden administration was promising an enduring, multi-year commitment to Afghani democracy as Taliban fighters rode up to the gates of Kabul.

You think he did a good job pulling out of Afghanistan are you serious..

Bro what

How about him pulling all the troops out before bringing back all the vehicles and weapons etc.. or getting out the American citizens

Or providing the Afghan government the means to operate the air force left there by the states and people who knew how to repair the jets

How can you say he did a good job? Regardless of if you think USA should still be occupying Afghanistan or not thinking he left it in an efficient way is crazy


Whatever you want to say it's fucking embarrassing USA lost to some 8th century barbarians lol

This post was edited by SlamFkingDunk on Mar 26 2022 10:27pm

There's some fair criticism of the bogus intel and situational assessment by the military and administration alike, and there's some blame for Biden there and more for the bureaucracy. I think what's really damning was when the whole house of cards came tumbling down and everyone was watching in realtime as Afghanistan imploded, and then the president was completely absent. That's where its unequivocally bad leadership, nobody else to blame. Biden can claim ignorance, he can blame the intel community, but he has to own up to his own actions or lack thereof. I think a parallel, albeit one with much lower stakes, was Trump during the January 6th riot. There was the rally Trump planned for, there were his unrealistic hopes for procedural gimmicks or a recount, and then there was the actual chaos that erupted when it broke into rioting and mob trespassing. And for about 80 minutes or so after the rioting broke out, Trump was silent. 1:50 it started, 2:45 ashli babbitt was killed, 3:15 trump tweeted a call for people to remain peaceful, 4:15 he put up a video telling people to go home. And on that day and days after and for the past two years and an entire congressional inquisition later, people are still faulting Trump for his slow response. Slow, measured in minutes.

Now for contrast, the Taliban started seizing control of major cities in May 2021, on a daily and weekly basis. From May to July they captured numerous capitals. Herat fell on the 13th of august, with the Taliban seizing control of all border crossings and leaving only the Kabul airport as a way out. By the 14th of august, the Taliban were surrounding Kabul and the panic started. On the 15th of august is when the complete chaos broke out and the military was desperately redirecting flights, civilians were climbing into the airports, helicopters were firing warning shots, people were trying to stowaway and fall out of planes. That's when we were watching it unfold on PARD, the planes with hundreds of people in them. That's when Joe Biden on the 14th of august put out a brief written statement saying he was working to support president ghani and other afghan leaders to seek a political settlement and ensure an orderly drawdown. Totally worthless. The evacuation continued chaotically throughout the 15th, to complete silence from the white house. Psaki was reported to be on vacation and nobody could get a peep from the administration, while the chaos was still in full swing. CNN was having a field day with full live team coverage all day long, it was what everyone in the nation was talking about, except Biden and his white house. On the 16th biden finally held his press conference defending his handling of the withdrawal and rationalizing how it had gone wrong. And then gave his scripted speech and walked off without taking any questions. And a week later a bombing killed 170 afghans and 13 americans and we responded by killing 10 more innocent afghans, 7 of them children. A slow response, measured in days and weeks and months

Don't get me wrong, I still fault Trump for being slower than he should have been, but he wasn't outrageously absent like Biden was

This post was edited by Goomshill on Mar 26 2022 10:51pm

that user was happy that innocent Americans and Afghan children died due to the swamp decision-making

it (that user) really has a sickness

Americans in the country were told by the State Department to get out. Maybe the administration should've focused more on that message, but ultimately thousands of Americans chose to ignore the instruction. Trying to locate and extract thousands of Americans from all around Afghanistan sounds like a nightmare. And I doubt the government has any authority to force Americans to leave.

You go on to say Biden would've been better off not evacuating Americans in the final days of the war. So one of your criticisms(leaving thousands of Americans behind) is followed by a recommendation for Biden to have left even more Americans behind.

@bold: That's why I'm trying to get into specifics, because Biden choosing to do things differently have consequences of their own. Once the Afghan government/military collapses and the Taliban is outside Kabul, how do you evacuate Americans in a superior way to what they did? How do you manage to pull out as many Afghans as possible? You suggest in your reply we shouldn't have even tried. That would be equivalent to Biden lighting himself on fire politically, and it would go down in history as one of the most embarrassing moments internationally for the United States. Again, the alternative path the critics propose often sounds worse than what actually happened.



There's a pretty big difference between collapsing in under a week, and collapsing in a few months. Had they held up a few months, it would've allowed more Americans and Afghans to leave.

My recollection from the reporting at the time is that the intelligence agencies did not expect the Afghans to fold so quickly. That's an intelligence failure. It's not a major mistake by Biden himself, which is what I'm still searching for, and have yet to hear a convincing argument.

Even the rosy estimates of the state department were that 10% of Americans who signed up to leave Afghanistan, wanted to leave and were prepared to do so, were left behind. Its not just bad politics to blame US citizens left behind in Afghanistan for their predicament, its irresponsible. It took until November-December before they were all accounted for, and we were still trickling people out in January and February this year in flights with dozens of people on them. If the Taliban had been the terrorists they were made out to be by the warmongering media of the 2000s, they would have had thousands of hostages. Instead they were disorganized goat fucker militias, most of whom had about as much connection to Kabul as to the moon. Americans got left behind even when they risked the dangerous travel across the country to reach the one airport capable of evacuating them, so I don't think the fault lies entirely with them.

There are clear ways we could have managed the evacuation better. We could have kept Bagram open. We could have chartered flights into airports other than Kabul international. We put an obscene restriction on the military securing our retreat when our retreat was entirely unsecured. What difference would it have made if flights were going to Taliban-held areas like Ghazni or Kandahar at that point, when we didn't even hold Kabul during the evacuation? We hamstrung ourselves by treating the Taliban as an evil menace out to destroy us at all costs while we were at the mercy of the Taliban who permitted our withdrawal. Recognizing the Taliban and negotiating with them to provide safe passage for Americans up to the deadline. Organize people to leave through the border crossings the Taliban held and drive to Pakistan. Or hell, if we wanted to maintain our hostile footing we could have done a military buildup in Kabul and evacuated our equipment only in the last days of the deadline. Instead we evacuated almost the entire force prior to the civilian evacuation, leaving Kabul undefended during the retreat.

All this speaks to dissonance in the American military command. We won't land planes at unsafe airports to evacuate people if there's a risk they could be shot down. Except we did, because we mismanaged our rout and had swarms of people begging to be evacuated, so we did it anyway, but only at Kabul, instead of evacuating people throughout the country. Our risk assessment was somehow valuing the air security over the lives of the people left behind. We weren't negotiating with the Taliban to secure our retreat, except the Taliban had already seized control of Kabul and were fine with letting Americans hold the airport and let people freely travel to it to the leave the country. We had the last few trigger happy soldiers left to protect our escape shooting at civilians and paranoid US command bombing aid workers and children, while the Taliban were off riding bumper cars and carousels because they were teenagers in a city for the first time.

We spent all this time treating the Taliban as boogeymen, and if they had been, then the results of our mismanagement would be thousands of Americans and a hundred thousand afghan collaborators all slaughtered by the Taliban. We were spared the fruits of our incompetence by our myopia.