The last US troops have been pulled out of the Kabul airport thus ending the 20 year war in Afghanistan and raising questions about the fate of the few hundred US civilians left behind. CNBC. The last Air Force C-17 flew out Monday afternoon. Over 116,000 people were evacuated in the effort. At least 200 American citizens were left behind, not counting Americans that chose to stay. The evacuation was marred by a massive ISIS terror attack that killed 12 Marines and 1 Navy corpsman, along with over 100 civilians and Taliban fighters. The Taliban have almost total control of the country now and are more powerful than when the war began in 2020 due to the massive amount of captured arms and equipment left behind with the former Afghan Army.
My Comment:
If there has been any good to come from the utter disaster that was this summer it is this. America's longest war is finally over. We are no longer in Afghanistan, a conflict we stayed into for far too long. We really had no business trying to build a functioning democracy in Afghanistan in the first place and it's clear now that we failed completely to do so.
Other than that single positive thing, this has been an utter disaster, only mitigated by the fact that it could have gotten much worse. After the major ISIS terror attack I was worried that ISIS might have actually been able to shut down the Kabul airport and/or take out an evacuating plane. Though they did apparently try to launch another terror attack they were stopped by a drone strike.
It didn't have to be this way. If we had done the reasonable thing and started to evacuate the troops before the diplomats and civilians we probably would have gotten everyone out. We could have kept Bagram Air Base as a secondary evacuation site and might have been able to use troops in other cities to evacuate people.
And the major terror attack? That was because we were forced to rely on the Taliban for our security. Either they failed in that responsibility or they actively thwarted it and now 13 US servicemembers are dead and more wounded. And it's not like we didn't know ISIS was active in Afghanistan, they have been present there for years, and though they were greatly degraded in their battles with the Taliban and through airstrikes, they were still alive and kicking.
Most embarrassing of all is the fact that Joe Biden broke his promise to get everyone out that wanted out. I don't trust the government numbers of 100 to 200 people still left behind. I am guessing there are quite a few more that never got the chance to actually contact the US government and had no means to even get to the Kabul area. Plus there are more than a few that wanted to stay behind.
What happens to those people is the biggest question. My sincere hope is that now that the American government is gone the Taliban will simply reopen the airport and buy these folks a ticket. Doing so would be the ultimate slap in the face to America as it would show the Taliban as being merciful. But it's also possible that these folks end up dead or as hostages. Now that America is out for good the Taliban have less reasons to be nice. Time will tell what happens.
Already some in the media are trying to spin this as a victory for the Biden administration. Don't let them. The mission to evacuate all American citizens from Afghanistan has failed. We left people behind and didn't even really try to get them. And no one has ever answered my question about what happened to the people who were in other cities outside of Kabul. These people were left behind and that is on Joe Biden.
And Biden deserves the lion's share of blame here. Bush deserves some for getting us in and so does Obama for not getting us out when he said he would. Trump might get a small sliver of blame simply for allowing someone as incompetent as Biden to replace him.
But Biden was the one who broke the truce with the Taliban (which is the reason my nickname for him is 'Oathbreaker'), he was the one who downplayed the threat of the Taliban as the country was falling, he's the one that went on vacation while city after city was falling. And he was the one that got 13 US service members killed.
This will almost certainly be the thing that Joe Biden's presidency will be defined by. If not, we are going to have an extremely tough remaining three years (assuming he isn't out of office because of death, resignation or removal). The image of American helicopters evacuating an embassy, Afghan civilians falling from airplanes and the wreckage and death left behind by a massive bombing are not going to leave anyone's minds anytime soon. As far as I am concerned Biden is a lame duck President that will cause his party to lose in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential race...
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