Yes, when polled a while back 7 out of 10 Americans said it was time to withdraw from Afghanistan. But not like this.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and U.S. President Barack Obama in a photo taken June 30, 2011.
And 8 out of 10 Americans now say that we shouldn’t have pulled our troops out until we’d gotten every American out, as well as those Afghans who fought with us against the Taliban. But Biden did it anyway.
Why? Because as Barack Obama‘s former defense secretary Bob Gates once famously said “Joe Biden has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” (I guess Biden didn’t want to break that record now in Afghanistan.)
Of course, Biden used the “ending endless wars” trope to justify frantically heading for the exits in Afghanistan, and all the chaos and death that’s resulted from it. But what Biden doesn’t seem to comprehend, is that wars don’t just end because you want them to. Particularly wars with terrorists.
We went into Afghanistan in the first place because we were attacked on September 11 on our own soil, and nearly 3000 Americans lost their lives. This was an unprovoked attack, by a terrorist group, Al-Qaeda, who at that time had a safe haven in Afghanistan under the Taliban. So we went (along with our NATO allies) into Afghanistan and took away that safe haven. For 20 years we haven’t suffered a major terrorist attack, despite the fact that many experts had predicted they would become all too common. So the Afghanistan strategy worked.
Scroll forward 20 years, to the present date. Blundering Biden announces “we’re outa here” and claims he’s just following Trump’s policy, even though he hasn’t hesitated to throw every other major Trump policy overboard. Or he blames the Afghan army for not fighting. This despite the fact that the Afghans have suffered over 3000 casualties in the last 18 months alone, with US casualties over that time amounting to – 0. And that’s just over the last year-and-a-half. If you look over the entire 20 years we’ve been there, nearly 70,000 Afghan troops have died fighting the Taliban, which is 30 for every one US death. So yes, the Afghans HAVE been fighting.
What Biden naïvely and disastrously did was pull all US intelligence and air support, causing the Afghan forces to collapse virtually overnight. And by pulling all American troops out, and stupidly giving up Bagram Air Base before US and Afghan civilians were safely out, he ensured that US and Afghan civilians would be stranded behind enemy lines.
We’ll now have a safe haven in Afghanistan for terrorists to gather from all across the globe, and plan future attacks on the US and our allies everywhere, including right here in America. And they’ll be even more deadly than ever, because they now have billions of dollars of sophisticated US weaponry to use against us.
So Joe, you haven’t gotten us out of an endless war, you’ve just made us even more vulnerable in the terrorist war against us. That’s why I truly believe, this was the worst US foreign policy disaster in American history.