Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ 24 Mar 2022 00:24)
Except that staying in Afghanistan would have been easy. It being unpopular with the American public doesn't matter one bit, which is why we were there for 20 years. He would have come out and said "Oh, we can't leave safely, so we'll delay it a bit longer" just like Obama did, just like Trump did until he had one foot out the door.
That would be a broken promise and would have required actively directing the military to scrap ongoing preparations, which would have found its way into the press, and so on.
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There's been plenty of testimony by military brass on why they gave up Bagram. It was impossible to maintain without a significant expenditure of forces backing up the Afghani government. It was not some unilateral decision by Biden to give up the air base. Trump would have had the same generals telling him the exact same thing.
I was not talking about permanently keeping Bagram Air Base, I was talking about the decision to give up this base first during the process of drawing down and planning to use a civilian airport in the middle of a dense, urban, potentially hostile city for the final steps of the evacuation. Had Bagram been the last base to be left behind, the takeover of the Taliban wouldn't have mattered - all the U.S. troops, all the diplomats, Western persons and local helpers could have waited on an easily secured air field in the middle of nowhere with plenty of space. Instead, Biden had to send in the 82nd Airborne to barely prevent a repeat of the Iran hostage crisis after a tense standoff with the taliban in the middle of Kabul.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 23 2022 07:21pm