There were different errors of different significance made by GWBush, Obama, Trump and Biden, with some errors corrected and some allowed to languish and continue, initially and in succeeding administrations.
The one giant error was the elephant that was always in the room - Pakistan, and which no administration was willing to really tackle in all its significance. Even as late as July 2020 that elephant was present, and it was mentioned in the July 23rd phone conversation between Biden and the President of Afghanistan. The Afghan president told Biden, directly, that “we are under a massive invasion” and “it has direct support in operations and material from Pakistan” and “includes 10 to 15 thousand foreign terrorists, predominately from Pakistan”. Treacherous Biden had ZERO to say about that in response to the Afghan President, and our “media” as been as silent about it as Biden.
Ignoring that elephant was a major error in every administration, and yet Obama was the first to have direct cause to expose it and alter U.S. course about it when Osama Bin Laden was found hiding in plain sight right near the Pakistan military compound in Abbottabad. The deep state has continued to cover for Pakistan on that score.
Obama was also the first to have the possibility of U.S. withdrawal, at a time when the Taliban was at their lowest point and the Afghan government the most secure since the U.S. invasion. And that was in 2014. Obama blew past that possibility just as in opposite fashion he drew down the U.S. mission in Iraq too quickly, which was readily taken advantage of by ISIS - which at one point controlled more of Iraq than the Iraqi government.
To me Trump erred in making a private U.S.-Taliban deal that excluded the participation of the Afghan government. Nothing said to the Afghan soldiers in the field that they could not depend on their own leaders more than seeing their leaders could not depend on the U.S. to even include them in talks with the Taliban. THAT appeared mto the Afghan government soldiers to say that “the war” was a “U.S.-Taliban” contest and not even about them; though 70,000 of them had died believing it was about them.
But contrary to all Biden’s lies he was under no legal or moral obligation to follow Trump’s private deal with the Taliban, nor to set or keep to any timeline he did not himself want to do.
Biden has also hidden well, via his media friends, that it was all his own withdrawal plan, not Trump’s and not what the Taliban had agreed to. Trumps plan was conditional on success of peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government, secession of Taliban offensives, benchmarks on those things and our timeline dependent on them, with Trump’s May 2021 date not written in stone if the conditions agreed to with the Taliban were not met. By early 2020 we had all of 2,500 troops left in Afghanistan, had not had a troop death there in nearly a year, and our missions were not “boots” on the ground but in air support and intelligence, both humit and electronic. 1. We could have continued that significant role, which was not at fantastic cost, as long as we chose and 2. when we pulled out of that role closing Bagram it pulled the rug out from under the Afghan troops in the field. [We had tried and failed to get Erdogan’s Turkey, as a NATO partner, to continue the NATO/U.S. role at Bagram, but Erdogan said no.]
The media has also hidden how Biden’s withdrawal was contrary to conditions laid down in the Defense Authorization Act that Congress passed, over Trump’s veto, in December 2020. That law contained an amendment that put restrictions and conditions on any U.S. President’s decision to withdraw any U.S. Troops from Germany, South Korea or Afghanistan. Biden did not even attempt to meet the legal requirements of that law in his Afghan withdrawal operations. And of course, though she could very well do it, Nancy Pelosi is not going to run an impeachment panel against Biden for his disregard of a law Pelosi herself backed in the House.
There is plenty of blame to go around, but at the end of the day, the final errors are all Biden’s and both fact and fate place him and his administration with the legacy of the U.S. Afghan exit, no matter who did what before Biden.
Biden, like Obama and other U.S. President’s set their sites too much on their own political legacy interests than on the best interests of the U.S.
Harry Truman did not let his own political legacy interests get in the way of ending the war in the Pacific. He took the burdensome step of using a nuclear first strike in order to avoid a massive U.S.-Japan ground war across all of Japan, with massive troop and civilian collateral damages along with it.
Biden merely surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban, when (a) doing so was not necessary and (b) will not end the Islamist Jihadist war in the Middle East, from the Taliban or any other quarter, regardless of all pretenses to the contrary.
There are no good Islamic Jihadists, no matter how much Biden thinks the U.S. should now partner with the Taliban vis-a-vis ISIS. The real U.S. interest is in letting ISIS and the Taliban have their own contests with each other. Maybe then enough Afghans will tire of both groups, seeing as how they are two peas in a pod.
No.
All of the horrible decisions that were made in the last few weeks and months were made by Biden and his administration and him and his administration alone. No one else contributed to them doing that. Bad decisions in the past that may have been made do not excuse these horrible decisions made in the present as though it left Biden no choice but to lead us into this disaster.
Bi what? The only Bi in this disaster ends in ‘den’
Thinking Christopher Bedford sounded like just another lefty, I looked him up. He’s not and has quite a number of right leaning articles he’s written.
That said, he’s trying to establish moral equivalency between the Chief Idiot Biden and Republican policy over the decades and there is none. Joe Stolen Biden is SINGULARLY responsible for putting a forever STAMP OF DISASTER on Afghanistan. Bedford needs to get a few more years on him.
Take your smug "we're all to blame" and shove it.
The globalist GOPe empire strikes back!
These morons need to stick to the crappy recommendations for the SCOTUS they perpetually come up with and stay out of foreign policy...
This article can best be described as Goebbels-like...
This is Biden's Surrender. Period!
It was Biden mindlessly doing the opposite of everything Trump did.
Who is ‘Christopher Bedford’ and why should anyone give a damn?