He did straight out tell Stephanopoulos in the interview that if there are American citizens there after August 31, “we’re gonna stay to get them all out”.
The same day he was flat-out wrong about that, the Pentagon was holding a press conference talking about ISIS and Al-Qaeda being in Afghanistan. Bidets, what do you think? Did someone forget to update the teleprompter for Biden’s legacy-defining speech?
No one except the intelligence reports they chose to ignore. Even without those reports, you make plans in case it happens. The buck stops with Biden.
I think it was somewhere between realistic and cynical. By this i mean biden believed that the US could not turn afghanistan into a democratic nation state, at least if it had not already done so. This is in sharp contrast to Bush, who i think was both idealistic and optimistic.
His description of the plan may have been optimistic about the short term outcome. As i recall he admitted that the taliban might eventually take control of the country. Again this does not sound necessarily optimistic to me.
How are you deciding whether he was being optimistic? I think it would be incredibly naive and oversimplifying to think he was optimistic simply because things went more poorly than described, and perhaps expected.
What do you think his other options were? What was the choice he effectively made fixed the information available at the time? And what would have been the right one?
This is the only way i know of to evaluate his choice.
Again, i think it would be terrible naive to only consider what actually happened.
It’s going to be a month or so before NOLA starts serving beignets again (Ida - you suck). And oh how tasty they are. In the meantime, I’ll stick with calling Biden’s supporters Bidets.
Replying to a bunch of posts here, but quoting this piece because blaming Biden for the terrorist attacks is bogus. The terrorist attacks are what they are - they don’t care what political party you follow, they care that you are an enemy of theirs, and that they can embarrass you and scare you.
As for the “choatic withdrawal” part… the country was TAKEN OVER. You know in chess how grandmasters don’t play the game out if they lose their rook, they just tip their king over and shake hands? Same thing here. We were beat. The Taliban forced us out. The only way they wouldn’t have forced us out was to send in even more troops, and repeat 2001 all over again with yet another quagmire. The Taliban left us no choice but to withdraw.
The biggest thing I think that should have been done differently (as opposed to some on here who think Biden did a perfect job) was processing the visas of Afghans faster. But, I’m not so sure how much of a difference that would have made, since the Taliban’s position on those Afghans just kept on changing over and over.
The chaos is all on Biden. He wanted the symbolism of getting it done in time for the 20th anniversary. We didn’t just “tip our king over”. We pulled our pieces off the board and someone said “Hey, you’re about to leave a bunch of people behind”. And yes, Biden does get the blame for the terrorist attack because he set up the situation that made a terrorist attack likely.
I think it should be clear I’m no Biden supporter, and he didn’t even come back from freaking vacation immediately as this was happening, but… c’mon man.
I think a lot of us would want to hear what your alternative idea would have been in that situation, or if you think something could have been done to prevent this to begin with, what that would have been. I think you are doing all second-guessing without providing an alternative. I’d love to be proven wrong, because this was embarrassing for the US.
I think he was legacy-shopping, wanting credit for the symbolism of pulling the last of the military out before the 20th anniversary of 9/11. That was his goal, so any information or data that got in the way of that was ignored. It’s no secret that Washington insiders are betting that people will forget about this by next year,
Obvious things are you don’t pull your military out before getting your civilians out. You keep your AF base instead of abandoning it and letting your allies say “hey, where did those guys go?” If you want to blame Trump, go ahead, but you’re also admitting you waited until the last minute to open the “Withdraw from Afghanistan” file.
Spoiler: we were never winning the war as people commonly think of it. But I’m sure most people knew that, it’s just that in America we never say that out loud.
Is the humiliation leaving after 20 years and not winning by some measure? Is it going there in the first place? Is it saying we’d help people there achieve freedom and then abandoning them? Is it something in between all of that? Yes, it’s humiliation if you think we suffered a defeat in that we never utterly wiped out the Taliban and didn’t make Afghanistan the new 21st centure shining example of modern democracy as viewed through the lens of the United States. It’s not if you look at it as “we wiped out the vast, vast majority of al-Qaeda and killed Osama bin Laden.” The humiliation after that was staying an extra decade to sufficiently spike the ball.
Somalia, 1993 was much more humiliating. This was just pointless stalemating for years under the notion that democracy would magically spring up and be embraced by people who have no idea what it is. We’re out, we kicked a whole lot of ass while we were there. Declare victory and move on.
I wondered about the 9/11 part myself, but I think it is mostly coincidence. I’m starting to feel like we’re going in circles here and am tempted to drop out, but our hand was forced by the Taliban taking Kabul. We had no leverage. I don’t really know how they agreed on August 31. And people will NOT forget this; this will come around to damage Biden politically, I think.
To the military pull-out… we DID wait to pull the military mostly until the end. The later parts of the withdrawal were almost exclusively military people and equipment. Unless you’re talking about the Americans who are still in Afghanistan, but we’ve already beaten that horse to death.
The guy’s talking right now, taking a victory lap. He still thinks the controversy is about the decision to withdraw, not the way he conducted the withdraw.
Didn’t realize he was giving a presser - I’ll have to watch the replay of it. Peter Doocy of Fox News (yes, yes, I know it’s Fox News, but keep reading) kept on Biden about this recently, by pressing Biden and reminding him that it wasn’t the fact that we withdrew that people were questioning, it was how we withdrew.