No. of Recommendations: 12
Anyone arguing that ANYTHING could have been done to keep the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan or exit Afghanistan with pride is delusional. Such a person is claiming it is possible to un-lose a war.
AMERICA LOST ITS WAR IN AFGHANISTAN.
Period.
Full stop.
America didn't choose to get attacked by terrorists operating out of Afghanistan. But America DID choose to respond to a terrorist attack by launching a ground war in a land-locked desert country already controlled by an anti-democratic, anti-western, terrorist-like sect (the Taliban) that had established control over the country over a twenty year period dating back to 1979 when ANOTHER industrialized military power attempted to impose rule on the same country and the same cultural forces.
America had zero interest in correcting the injustices of Taliban rule in October 2021. We just wanted to track down bin Laden, kill him and destroy anything that looked like a terrorist training ground or had monkey bars visible in satelite photos.
When the US military failed to trap bin Laden amid the caves in Bora Bora and it became apparent bin Laden escaped Afghanistan, the Bush Administration had already distracted itself with exacting revenge on Saddam Hussein for having attempted an assasination on Bush I in the early 1990s by fabricating a threat of WMD to justify an invasion of Iraq. About the same time, looking for some alternate mission to justify a presence in Afghanistan, the Bush Administration and US media began pushing the need to foster democracy in Afghanistan and "rescue the girls." With the same clueless confidence exuded in so many other areas of America's "war on terror," the Bush Administration suddenly assumed toppling the Taliban, creating a democratic government that never previously existed and ensuring access to education for girls was a viable goal that could be accomplished in a couple of months and that became the new mission, despite the US government and public giving exactly zero hoots about "the girls" of Afghanistan since 1979.
The US government changed military tactics three or four times and changed political strategies to match between early 2002 and 2019 and nothing proved capable of resulting in a stable democracy, a functional professional class to operate the police, the courts, electric utilities, telecom utilities and all of the other functions required to support a modern economy and polity. Most of this was understood by roughly 2004, yet America continued to throw American lives and treasure at this folly for nearly twenty years.
Trump didn't "lose" the war in Afghanistan for American by finally setting the terms for American forces to leave (both the how and when). The war had been lost by America choosing to launch it in the first place, then doubling down every four years with another delusional strategy for winning the un-winnable. Could the Trump terms have been better? Definitely, the release of Taliban prisoners could have been structured and timed differently. Everything else? Not so much. We. Needed. To. Get. Out.
Did America leave "billions of dollars" worth of equipment behind in Afghanistan? No, America left behind millions of POUNDS of rusted-out, twenty year old worthless gear that had been in continous operation in a hostile, dusty, desert climate. Even had America WON the war, it would not have been worth attempting to drive that equipment out of the country and transporting it back to America or any other deployment for "re-use." It was scrap. Anything posing a military threat was grenaded prior to leaving. No one who knows ANYTHING about military logistics would worry about leaving equipment behind when exiting a war zone of a war in which you are the retreating loser.
WTH
