We’re not even out of Afghanistan yet and the country has completely fallen apart, with the Taliban taking over city after city every day:
AXIOS – With Afghan cities falling to the Taliban day after day, the U.S. is sending in more troops — to help evacuate American diplomats.
The State Department announced today that it will shrink down to a “core diplomatic presence” in Kabul due to the deteriorating security situation. The Pentagon is sending 3,000 troops to Afghanistan’s international airport to assist in that mission and help get Afghans who worked with U.S. troops out of the country.
President Biden brought together his senior national security team last night for a briefing on Afghanistan, and by this morning, there was a unanimous decision to send in troops and partially evacuate the embassy.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price attempted to downplay the announcement, insisting that it “shouldn’t be read as any sort of message to the Taliban.”
The Biden administration continues to insist that the Taliban will sacrifice any future international legitimacy if it takes power by force and points to the negotiating table in Doha, Qatar, as the true path forward.
Such statements sound increasingly futile as the Afghan government’s hold on the country evaporates by the hour.
Meanwhile, the Taliban today took Afghanistan’s second and third largest cities and the provincial capital closest to Kabul.
That brings the number of provincial capitals captured over the last week to 12, an astounding number considering the group didn’t hold a single major city prior to last Friday. The Taliban now controls more than two-thirds of Afghanistan’s territory.
What a freaking mess. Don’t get me wrong, I am for pulling out of Afghanistan. But there’s gotta be a better way than this. We are watching everything we did over there completely vanish. I mean why were we there for all these years putting the blood of our soldiers on the line?
Trump put out a statement today responding to this madness, saying he wouldn’t have allowed any of this to happen:
Had our 2020 Presidential Election not been rigged, and if I were now President, the world would find that our withdrawal from Afghanistan would be a conditions-based withdrawal. I personally had discussions with top Taliban leaders whereby they understood what they are doing now would not have been acceptable. It would have been a much different and much more successful withdrawal, and the Taliban understood that better than anyone. What is going on now is not acceptable. It should have been done much better.
I’d like to think Trump is right about this. But it almost sounds like a catch-22, meaning we’d never be able to fully leave the country because a soon as we did, this would happen and we’d be sending our troops right back to re-stabilize the country.
Either way, Trump is right that what is happening now is completely unacceptable. But Biden insists we are pulling out and he has no regrets.
There’s much more in the article, including cries for US air support by the Afghan National Army and the suggestion that the Pentagon might accommodate at some point in the future.
