No. of Recommendations: 8
Again, this is nuanced. It's being portrayed as black and white with a healthy amount of futurecasting going on.
It's not, really. There is absolutely no dispute that the Afghan armed and security forces were utterly incapable of defending the government from the Taliban - both in terms of their capabilities and their willingness to fight, rather than join, the enemy.
That was the core condition of their armed and security forces. This was not a contingent situation - one where the tide of battle was turned by chance or happenstance or a particularly unexpected or cunning strategy. Their forces were completely and utterly unable to prevent the Taliban from taking over. They were wholly unprepared to even materially delay the Taliban from rising, let alone actually prevent it from happening.
So no, there's no real doubt. This is not really futurecasting - the actual state of operational readiness of their forces at the time of the withdrawal and for years prior was far, far, FAR worse than anyone in the U.S. recognized. There is no way that they could have stopped the Taliban under even an ideal withdrawal - they were completely overmatched.
The only thing that kept the Taliban from ever taking over was the U.S. defense commitment to the government, our mission and rules of engagement that had our military forces interposing themselves between the Taliban and the Ghani regime. Once that was removed, their defeat was unavoidable. And Trump had already resolved to remove it, so had he been re-elected it would have ended the same way.
