YES..
The evacuation was a fucking mess….
My view from reading in on this from several sources is that US Military leaders felt that the Commander-in- Chief , President Biden, wanted ‘Out’ Period….
My view is that former President Trump made a deal with the Taliban that President Biden could have changed easily , but did NOT want to….
The evacuation was haphazard, poorly planned and executed….
The blame cannot be on Trump….
It MUST be on Biden….
Who WAS WARNED by the military and lawmakers about taking such a extreme and hasty step….
He did NOT heed their warnings….
The Pentagon Generals where following orders…
The troops on the ground did the best they could….
Something like what happened should NEVER happen again…..
The White House has maintained that Biden had few options after his predecessor, President Donald Trump, signed a deal with the Taliban in 2020 that required U.S. forces to leave the country. With its summary, the White House again sought to fault Trump for the chaos, even as it acknowledged that the Biden administration has handled later crises — in Ukraine and Ethiopia — far differently after what transpired in Kabul.
“We now prioritize earlier evacuations when faced with a degrading security situation,” the summary said, noting that the administration withdrew some personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia in November 2021 “despite the vigorous objections of the Ethiopian government,” and last year evacuated personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv nearly two weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But the White House summary glosses over other key details about the evacuation from Afghanistan that cast the Biden administration in a negative light, including that Biden had ordered the withdrawal of all U.S. troops despite recommendations from defense officials who wanted the commander in chief to keep a force of about 2,500 in Afghanistan to help prevent the U.S.-backed government from collapsing.
The document makes no mention either that senior U.S. military officials who participated in the evacuation expressed frustration with the administration when interviewed as part of an earlier Defense Department investigation. In documents first reported on by The Washington Post last year, the senior commander during the mission, Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, told military investigators that the United States would have been “much better prepared to conduct a more orderly” evacuation “if policymakers had paid attention to the indicators of what was happening on the ground.”….
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The evacuation pulled from harm’s way more than 120,000 people — Americans and Afghans who aided the war effort — in less than three weeks, but it was an operation that appeared on the brink of spiraling out of control for days before catastrophe struck.
With few good options to ensure security outside the airport where thousands had massed, desperate to catch a departing flight, U.S. military officials reached an uneasy agreement with the Taliban. Militant fighters were posted outside to maintain order while coalition troops processed those seeking entry. Service members involved in the mission have since said that they witnessed Taliban foot soldiers routinely beating civilians attempting to reach the airport and executing some of them….
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In February, an independent assessment by a U.S. inspector general concluded that each administration made moves — Trump’s decision to cut a deal with the Taliban and Biden’s choice to follow through on it — that presaged disintegration of Afghan security forces whom the Pentagon had equipped and trained for years. Those two actions, the watchdog said, “fundamentally altered every subsequent decision” by the U.S. government, the Afghan government and the Taliban, and “destroyed the morale of Afghan soldiers and police” because they relied so heavily on U.S. air power to stop the militant group.
The inspector general also determined that the “stage had been set” for collapse long before, by multiple U.S. administrations and the Afghan government, which failed to build units that were self-sustainable….
image…Sgt. Victor Mancilla/AP