After Sunday It’s Even More Clear Biden Was Right | Talking Points Memo:
It is crystal clear that the Afghan national army and really the Afghan state was an illusion. It could not survive first contact with a post-US military reality. As is so often the case in life – with bad investments, bad relationships – what we were doing there was staying to delay our reckoning with the consequences of the reality of the situation.That’s a bad idea.
But as I’ve said in other posts over the last two days, we knew this part. What has been deeply revealing to me is the American response. And here I mean to say the most prominent media and political voices. It’s true this is quicker than I’d figured – not that I’d given the precise timing a lot of thought. And it seems to be quicker than the White House figured. But by a month? Three months? Does that matter? I don’t see why. If anything, given the outcome, quicker is better – since a protracted fall is necessarily a bloodier fall. But what the reaction has demonstrated to me is the sheer depth of denial. The inability to accept the reality of the situation. And thus the excuse making. Sen. Maggie Hassan’s press release below is a painfully good example of that. So is this article by in The Atlantic by George Packer. Virtually everything Richard Engel has been writing on Twitter for the last 24 hours. All so much the cant of empire. But more than this, far more important than this, simply unwise.
Over the last week, I have been watching and reading the steadily and speedily escalating news out of Afghanistan. I have mostly ignored and avoided the steady and speedily escalating rhetoric in the press and among pundits about the US withdrawal and the implosion of the government we have been propping up for the last twenty years.
I think Josh is right on with his analysis. We should have gotten out long ago, and the fact that everything quickly fell apart the second we were out the door only reinforces that opinion for me.