The government spent millions of researching and interviewing many people about the Afghanistan pullout. I bet they didn’t ask the one simple question I would have asked. “Why did you wait until the last minute to leave?”

            The Military and the State Department had been reducing their presence for weeks so why did thousands of people wait when they could have flown, driven, or walked out of the country. More than a year past after former President Trump started the process and Biden continued on the same timeline so it wasn’t a secret when we would be leaving.

            The recap of all those pages was twelve pages which laid the blame on Trump and the Biden administrations. I put over ninety percent of the blame on the people who stayed home during the previous several weeks instead of leaving.

            I just said in twenty-one words what the recap should have said but didn’t. Unfortunately it is difficult to plan for stupidity which is what waiting until the Taliban is “at the gates” before trying to withdraw money from the banks and get exit visas amounts to. The ones who carried out their plans had already left so why did thousands expect to get special treatment? It wasn’t Trump or Biden’s fault for the crowds at the airport or the Afghan Army falling apart because their officers had left.

            It would have been the same after twenty-five years or thirty years. It was probably time to leave whether I thought we should or not.

            I still disagree with pulling out of Afghanistan but I have since learned much more in the last few days of the retreat. We allowed the massive country – wide corruption. It ran from the top to select individuals in commerce, military and others. They siphoned off billions instead of paying the lower troops and civil servants. Some haven’t been paid for many months. Our senior state department and allied military leadership were told to not interfere.

            No American soldier has been killed since February 2020. I thought it was by tactical luck but it was an agreement by the Trump administration. The agreement Trump made with the Taliban was we would leave in May 2021 if they didn’t kill an American. We did lots of small operations and backed up Afghan military operations after the agreement but apparently Americans were not to be killed.

            We have a history of nation building efforts with some being successful and some not so much. We spent twenty years trying to build a competent nation in Afghanistan and failing. President Biden says five, ten, twenty more years wouldn’t make any difference. I don’t think I disagree with him but I think history will quickly show we needed to stay to continue to go after international terrorism bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Welcome to the 22nd Century!

I image almost all of America was surprised to learn that former General and now Secretary of Defense Mattis said we cannot have a military victory in Afghanistan, I remember the uproar when Obama said we would reduce troop levels by a certain time. Where is that uproar by those same people? Oops, they are in power now!

How can we send troops to a combat situation after we tell them you can’t win so don’t get hurt too bad. This reminds me of Viet Nam when that war was mismanaged. Nixon kept putting troops in after he knew he had lost the PR war and thus invigorated the North Vietnamese leadership to continue. Now we have a similar situation.

An old axiom of military training is leaders fight the last war instead of planning for the next one. We pulled out of Afghanistan before winning there to move those troops to Iraq. We mismanaged the Sunnis causing the Iraq Civil War. JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Bush II, and now Trump thought more of not losing on their watch than saving our troops. Obama tried to get out of Afghanistan but its stability was in question. He pulled troops out of Iraq because we could not get a treaty keeping them from Iraqi law for any crimes the Iraqis considered an American Trooper committed.

Alexander, the Great, discovered the only way to beat the fierce Afghans was to marry the daughter of the biggest tribe. That sounds like a possibility for a President with a ticked off third wife!