Davin News Server

Ed P wrote:
> On 11/15/2024 1:54 AM, Leonard Blaisdell wrote:
> 
>> Tell me again how Trump was responsible for the clown show withdrawl
>> from Afghanistan. I love to laugh. DEI! DEI! DEI!
>>
> 
> He did make a deal with the Taliban.  Seems he has a bit of 
> responsibility too.

You're as big a moron as the pecksniff canuck hoser!



https://www.heritage.org/heritage-national-security-experts-never-forget-bidens-botched-afghanistan-withdrawal-killed-13

“Three years after the disastrous withdrawal from Kabul where 13 
Americans were killed at Abbey Gate, the Taliban paraded abandoned U.S. 
military equipment reminding us of the steep costs of embarrassingly bad 
decisions made by the Biden-Harris administration.
“The Biden-Harris administration has returned control of Afghanistan to 
the Taliban—now the best equipped terrorist state in history. The 2,459 
U.S. military personnel and 20,769 wounded in action in Afghanistan did 
not serve for this end result.
“ISIS is rebuilding, Al-Qaeda is resurgent, the administration is 
reportedly paying the Taliban $30-40 million a week, and we’ve not 
conducted an “over the horizon” counterterrorism strike since the 
withdrawal.”

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/08/15/afghanistan-withdrawal-pullout-military-taliban-chaos-evacuation-biden-inhofe/

After taking office, Biden undertook a superficial review of our 
Afghanistan policy—one that totally ignored the advice of his top 
military advisor and his commanders on the ground. On April 14, 2021, he 
reversed the Trump administration’s conditions-based drawdown policy and 
announced that all U.S. forces would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by 
Sept. 11 of that year, whether or not the Taliban had met its 
commitments under the 2020 agreement.

Today is a deeply sad anniversary. One year ago, the Taliban seized 
Kabul, the Afghan government collapsed, and U.S. President Joe Biden 
ordered a hasty and chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan. When the crisis 
ended two weeks later, 13 U.S. service members had been killed and 
hundreds or more U.S. citizens had been left behind to fend for 
themselves under the Taliban’s brutal rule.

Future historians will ask how a global superpower like the United 
States seemed so unprepared for Afghanistan’s unraveling. Here’s what 
they should know: Almost everyone who paid any attention to Afghanistan 
saw it coming—everyone, that is, except Biden and his insular circle of 
advisors.

The United States went to war in Afghanistan following the 9/11 
terrorist attacks for two main reasons: to punish those responsible and 
to prevent any future attacks from being planned and organized from 
Afghan soil. The two-decade war was costly, not least to our men and 
women in uniform: 2,448 U.S. service members were killed and 20,752 
service members were wounded during the war. Yet the U.S.-led effort 
also helped sustain an Afghan government that, for all of its many 
shortcomings, prevented the Taliban’s resurgence, countered al Qaeda and 
the Islamic State, and afforded Afghans unprecedented freedoms for 
nearly two decades.

Nobody wanted a “forever war” in Afghanistan—I certainly didn’t. That’s 
why I supported then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s February 2020 
agreement with the Taliban, which conditioned the withdrawal of U.S. 
troops from Afghanistan on the Taliban’s implementation of wide-ranging 
counterterrorism commitments. In the interim, Trump right-sized the U.S. 
force posture, reducing troop levels from roughly 12,000 service members 
in February 2020 to 2,500 service members (according to U.S. Defense 
Department numbers) by the time he left office—a sufficient presence for 
supporting the Afghan government’s security efforts and ensuring that 
the Taliban kept their end of the bargain.

After taking office, Biden undertook a superficial review of our 
Afghanistan policy—one that totally ignored the advice of his top 
military advisor and his commanders on the ground. On April 14, 2021, he 
reversed the Trump administration’s conditions-based drawdown policy and 
announced that all U.S. forces would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by 
Sept. 11 of that year, whether or not the Taliban had met its 
commitments under the 2020 agreement.


The only thing that has been “decimated” in Afghanistan, to borrow 
Biden’s term, is everything that U.S. service members sacrificed to build.

Eight days after Biden’s announcement, the commander of U.S. Central 
Command, U.S. Marines Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie Jr., told the Senate 
Armed Services Committee that he was concerned about the “ability of the 
Afghan military to hold the ground that they’re on now without the 
support that they have been used to for many years.” He also 
acknowledged that counterterrorism strikes would be much harder without 
a U.S. presence.

In May 2021, USA Today reported that Afghan translators, who had worked 
alongside U.S. personnel for years, feared that the Taliban would take 
over and kill them once U.S. troops departed. They begged the Biden 
administration for help—and members of Congress, on both sides of the 
aisle, echoed their pleas to start evacuating U.S. citizens and 
partners. Meanwhile, the Taliban saw Biden’s unconditional withdrawal as 
an invitation to ramp up their offensive. Afghan government forces stood 
down because they saw no chance of winning without U.S. support.

Throughout this period, Biden refused to reexamine his policy. On July 
8, 2021, even as the Taliban were on the march, he insisted that the 
Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan was not yet inevitable. Meanwhile, his 
administration refused to expedite the evacuation of U.S. citizens and 
Afghan partners because it feared this would signal a lack of confidence 
in the Afghan government.

When the Taliban finally entered Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, they took the 
Afghan capital without a fight. Even with many thousands of U.S. 
citizens and Afghan partners still in the country, the Biden 
administration stuck to its new, self-imposed Aug. 31 deadline for 
completing the withdrawal. The result was utter chaos: Thousands of U.S. 
service members were suddenly deployed to Kabul’s international airport 
to assist the evacuation effort and contend with masses of ordinary 
Afghans desperate to escape Taliban rule.

Our service members rose to the occasion, as they always do, and helped 
evacuate around 124,000 people under incredibly difficult circumstances. 
But the Islamic State still found a way to exploit the havoc, killing 13 
U.S. service members near an airport gate on Aug. 26, 2021. Nearly one 
year later, the Biden administration has failed to hold the perpetrators 
accountable because the withdrawal has severely diminished U.S. 
counterterrorism capabilities in Afghanistan."