dajo9 said:
OdontoBear66 said:
okaydo said:
Part of being president is making brave decisions.
What, is the GOP going to go after Biden for not prolonging this war? Well, they could try. But it would only help him.
The brave and right decision was to get out. The way it was done in communication, intelligence, leaving material to the tune of $83B, and leaving Americans behind ("we will help them" by Blinken is a bit short after the last week), as well as our Afghani helpers. Total, total disaster. I agree with the decision and an idiot made up and insisted on the plan (Rice, Blinken, et al). Biden is in the caves. He just does what they tell him.
I predicted Odonto's response back in June
https://bearinsider.com/forums/6/topics/102338/replies/1888782
You nailed it.
It seems Odonto and other conservatives have some selective memory. They've completely ignored the one-sided deal Trump cut with the Taliban which froze out the Afghan government and the fact that the Taliban's leader (Abdul Ghani Barador) was released from prison in 2018 at Trump's request!
Let's just hope the empowerment of the Taliban doesn't come back to bite us. I'm glad we're out and back the decision but the rot that led to recent events set in a long time ago and should be borne by the last 4 presidents, not just Biden. I'm confident that when history looks back, Biden won't end up looking so bad compared to his predecessors (including Obama) with respect to Afghanistan.
For anyone interested,
this is a pretty balanced take. It quotes Lisa Curtis, a senior Trump appointee to the NSC who was involved in Afghanistan during her time there:
Quote:
The historic deal was always high-wire diplomacy, requiring a degree of trust in the Taliban as a potential peace partner and inked despite skepticism from war-weary Afghans who feared losing authority in any power-sharing agreement.
"The Doha agreement was a very weak agreement, and the U.S. should have gained more concessions from the Taliban," said Lisa Curtis, an Afghanistan expert who served during the Trump administration as the National Security Council's senior director for South and Central Asia.
She called it "wishful thinking" to believe that the Taliban might be interested in lasting peace. The resulting agreement, she said, was heavily weighted toward the Taliban, contributed to undermining Afghan President Ashraf Ghani he fled the country Sunday and facilitated the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners without a commensurate concession from the Taliban.
"They wanted U.S. forces out, and they wanted to take over the country militarily, and they believed that they could do that," Curtis said of the Taliban. "That was just crystal clear."
...
In hindsight, though, said Curtis, the U.S. should not have entered the Doha talks "unless we were prepared to represent the Afghan government's interests. It was an unfair negotiation because nobody was looking out for the interests of the Afghan government."