The unfolding disaster in Afghanistan is a bipartisan, transadministrational failure. It is a humiliation. The fact is that after 20 years, after thousands of lives were lost and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on the military, police, training, infrastructure, and education, the country fell in days.
Whatever your position is on the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, however, it is incumbent on President Joe Biden, and no one else, to competently conduct a military withdrawal of his choosing—and, at the very least, avoid humiliation. On this front, Biden catastrophically failed.
Then again, the president has never shown a morsel of wisdom or proficiency on foreign policy. As one former Obama Pentagon official put it not long ago, Biden isn’t really a student of history; he is driven by “gut instincts.”
Indeed. The problem is that his instincts are complete garbage.
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