No. of Recommendations: 10
That's not a certainty. A series of A-10 strikes on a Taliban convoy of Toyota Hiluxes would have slowed them down.
But that wasn't going to happen. That's what the U.S. withdrawal meant - we were no longer going to be providing military support in defense of the Afghan government. We might have kept troops there for our own purposes, like we do in Guantanamo. But our military resources in country were no longer going to be in service of the Afghani defenses. We were no longer fighting the Taliban, no matter how many troops we kept stationed there. Which meant that the government was going to fall, and we weren't going to slow them down.
Facts not in evidence. It's not a binary thing "We said we would withdraw, therefore all troops would have been withdrawn".
Only Joe Biden took the "withdraw" as a pell-mell rush to the exits. That's 100% on him, not Trump. Nobody told Joe Biden to mess this up to the degree he did.
Withdrawal was the Trump decision - we would be withdrawing sufficient troops so that we would no longer be engaged in the mission of defending the Afghan government. We were never going to maintain troops in sufficient numbers to, or for the purpose of, defending the government from the Taliban. The withdrawal decision meant that as of that date, the Afghani government was on its own. We might have left troops in-country, but they would not be engaged in that mission.
That would not have changed had Trump been re-elected. That decision had already been made, and it was based on the mistaken readiness assessment of the Afghan forces. Both the Trump and Biden Administrations believed that the Afghan forces were both willing and capable of defending the government against Taliban forces, at least in the short- and intermediate-term. That was wrong. The Afghan forces were illusory - and unwilling to really resist the Taliban.
So there's no rational basis for concluding that the Ghani government would have avoided falling to the Taliban under a second Trump Administration. The reason they fell was because their national defense forces were incapable of resisting the Taliban - so once the U.S. military stopped defending them against the Taliban, they were certain to fall. If we're super charitable to Trump, at best we might have had a more orderly withdrawal - but again, the reason the withdrawal was so chaotic was (in part) because our readiness assessment of the Afgani forces was so completely wrong, and that was something that was also the case when Trump was in office. But there's no plausible argument that Kabul could have resisted the Taliban once we stopped defending them.
