His goal to do so is symbolically done…
I and a whole lot of others will blame him for how messy it has been done….
But I have no quibble with his goal….
The Taliban wanted their country ….
They now have it….
I have posted extensively about Afghanistan here…..
Before, during and after the ‘Airbridge ‘ evacuation….
I have not minced words that the operation started as a cluster fuck and only got marginally better as it progressed…
I have pointed out the American President was warned by his military, the intelligence community , lawmakers and foreign leaders to NOT do this so hastily…
President Biden did NOT heed that advice….
A President that has avoided the media for the last 7 months has found it important to go before the media to explain his actions numerous time in the last two weeks….
This IS Joe Biden’s
No amount of mentioning Trump’s August 31 deadline for withdrawal will erase that….
President Biden IS the Commander-in-Chief….
He gave the orders to proceed….
Donald Trump is a private citizen….
No amount of trying to blame his national security staff or military should be entertained…
The ‘buck stops at the top’……
But?
Here’s where Biden may come out with a recovery….
The media narrative has been just about Kabul Airport….
Peaking past that by some media reports show a country going about its daily business for the most part….
The point I have made here and is fast becoming the new media focus will be the Taliban governing….
THAT is where President Biden seems to want to go….
The Taliban celebrated at the last American military cargo jet departing today….
But already?
They will have to make ‘deals’ with other Middle East and maybe even Western Countries , including American ones to actually run the Kabul Airport….
The Airbridge took out tens of thousand’s of Afghan’s….
Among them had to be those who ran the countries government (corrupt or not), financial and infrastructure …..
While reports are that Taliban people are replacing those gone?
That is a recipe for disaster domestically….
Fighters with guns are NOT civil servants ….
Who is gonna be the cops?
Who are gonna be the doctors?
Who are gonna run discipled military ?
ISIS-K did two terrorist attacks against those leaving in the Taliban’s country….
The Taliban leaders seem to have worked WITH the American military to try and stop the first attack and go after the second one….
The Taliban leaders and military HAVE been working TOGETHER since Biden gave the order’s to depart….
Going forward?
The leaders of Taliban Afghanistan , who were NOT the ones fighting with the troops, and spent their time outside the country during the last few years….And worked WITH the Trump admin and the West to start the ball rolling on their eventual coming home…
The West backed Afghan government was corrupt….
The Out going leader left the country in a helicopter full of cash….
The Afghan military was NEVER what it was advertised to be…..
And?
Afghanistan has never been comfortable as a ‘nationalistic’ nation….
Tribes is what things are culturally….
American’s WILL be back….
The West will be back….
Hopefully Joe Biden will come out on top…..
The end of the United States’ longest war was unceremonious — trash blowing across the single airstrip of Kabul’s international airport, Afghans lingering outside the gates, still hoping in vain for evacuation, Taliban firing victoriously into the night sky.
In its final days, it was two U.S. Marines shaking hands with Taliban fighters in the dim glow of the domestic terminal. It was lines of starved and dehydrated evacuees boarding gray planes that took them to uncertain futures. It was the Taliban’s leadership dictating their terms, as a generation of Afghans pondered the end of 20 years of some kind of expanded hope.
…
Afghanistan has once more completed a cycle that has repeatedly defined the past 40 years of violence and upheaval: For the fifth time since the Soviet invasion in 1979, one order has collapsed and another has risen. What has followed each of those times has been a descent into vengeance, score-settling and, eventually, another cycle of disorder and war.
It is up to the Taliban, now, to decide whether they will perpetuate the cycle of vengeance, as they did upon seizing power from a group of feuding warlords in 1996, or will truly embrace the new path that their leaders have promised in recent days: one of acceptance and reconciliation….
…
The United States’ conflict in Afghanistan was a long war with a quick end, or so it seemed. But the withdrawal’s fate was set more than 18 months ago, when the Trump administration signed an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw from the country by May 1, 2021. In exchange, the Taliban agreed to stop attacking Americans, end mass-casualty attacks on Afghans in cities, and prevent Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups from finding refuge in the country.
The Taliban’s leverage, earned after years of fighting the world’s most advanced military, multiplied as they captured more remote outposts and checkpoints, then rural villages and districts, then the roads in between them. By the beginning of this year, the Taliban had positioned themselves near several key cities, as the newly inaugurated Biden administration weighed whether to honor the agreement made under President Donald J. Trump to depart….
…
Even before Mr. Biden’s announcement and Mr. Trump’s deal with the Taliban, the United States had been in stages of withdrawal since December 2009, when President Barack Obama announced both a surge of tens of thousands of troops and their departure by 2014.
Since then, Afghans and America’s allies have been in varying stages of alarm and second-guessing, clambering to secure their future and business interests. This uncertainty reinforced the endemic corruption that the West decried, but continued to feed it with billions of dollars in the hope it might somehow change.
Now, at the end, the Afghan politicians and entrepreneurs and elite who fed off the war’s coffers have largely fled. The final U.S. military planes departed, leaving behind at least 100,000 Afghans eligible for resettlement in the United States for their work with the Americans.
The evacuation, which began in July as an orderly and modest relocation of a few thousand Afghans, devolved into an apocalyptic exodus as Kabul collapsed on Aug. 15. Hundreds, then thousands, amassed at the gates; people abandoned their cars; and U.S. forces watched on infrared cameras as people overran their defenses, not with tanks or explosives but with sheer mass….
…
The Americans and the Taliban then worked together to clear the airport and establish a perimeter after frantic Afghans fell from the underbelly of transport planes and the thud-thud-thud of helicopters evacuated the U.S. Embassy, one of the world’s largest diplomatic missions. The evacuation became plagued by scenes that evoked those of another generational American war, when Saigon fell and helicopters were pushed from ships to sea….
…
“We have a mutually beneficial relationship with the Taliban,” one soldier said unironically this month, standing near the sea of people holding signs and documents and passports in the dead of night, illuminated by the flashlights attached to rifles held by American soldiers who yelled at them to stop pushing and get back. One person was caught in the string of barbed wire and ripped free by panicked family members as more steel barrier coils were laid in place….
…
As for those left behind in Afghanistan, a country of 38 million minus the thousands who have fled or died in recent weeks, all they can do is look forward, asking themselves and anyone who will listen: What comes next?