National Security Council releases 12 page summary of its review of the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan

[essentialsaltes]

WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. review led by the National Security Council of the chaotic 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan largely lays the blame on former President Donald Trump, saying President Joe Biden was “severely constrained” by the decisions of his predecessor.

12 page summary

 

[HTacianas]

WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. review led by the National Security Council of the chaotic 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan largely lays the blame on former President Donald Trump, saying President Joe Biden was “severely constrained” by the decisions of his predecessor.

12 page summary

That reads like a Biden re-election campaign commercial.

 

[Pommer]

That reads like a Biden re-election campaign commercial.

He’s not going to run, you know.

 

[disciple Clint]

WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. review led by the National Security Council of the chaotic 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan largely lays the blame on former President Donald Trump, saying President Joe Biden was “severely constrained” by the decisions of his predecessor.

12 page summary

Biden's number one excuse: blame Trump. Biden acted against the advice of all of his military advisors but somehow its is Trumps fault what a bundle of baloney.

 

[Ana the Ist]

WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. review led by the National Security Council of the chaotic 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan largely lays the blame on former President Donald Trump, saying President Joe Biden was “severely constrained” by the decisions of his predecessor.

12 page summary

12 pages...

Is that some kind of joke?

 

[Ana the Ist]

He’s not going to run, you know.

Who is?

 

[disciple Clint]

He’s not going to run, you know.

Looks like he is running.... running away from taking any responsibility for one of the worst blunders that any president has ever made. It was all him on his watch and against the recommendations of the experts. He wanted credit for ending the war and now he wants to blame Trump for his own failures, nothing new there he has done that over and over.

 

[USincognito]

That reads like a Biden re-election campaign commercial.

You were able to determine that by seeing the OP and reading all 12 pages in 15 minutes?

Sounds like you just read the summary in the OP and assumed.

 

[USincognito]

Biden's number one excuse: blame Trump. Biden acted against the advice of all of his military advisors but somehow its is Trumps fault what a bundle of baloney.

Did you read the report?

(I suspect you didn't because the report was not written by or for, nor issued by President Biden.)

 

[HTacianas]

You were able to determine that by seeing the OP and reading all 12 pages in 15 minutes?

Sounds like you just read the summary in the OP and assumed.

It's only 12 pages. Large font. It only takes a few minutes to read. It's not written very well. I was expecting it to be more organized.

 

[Nithavela]

That reads like a Biden re-election campaign commercial.

Reality points towards re-electing Biden. Thus, reality must be rejected.

 

[wing2000]

12 pages...

Is that some kind of joke?

"summary"

 

[wing2000]

The fact is both Trump and Biden were committed to leave Afghanistan. Had Trump won a 2nd term, he would have been facing the same constraints that Biden did. The US failed to appreciate how quickly the Afghan government and military would fold. And when that become apparent, the US was in no position to respond. Neither leader was going to send in 5-10 thousand US troops back to Afghanistan to secure our exit. It simply was not politically feasible after so many years of lost American lives.


President Biden had committed to ending the war in Afghanistan, but when he came into office he was confronted with difficult realities left to him by the Trump Administration. President Biden asked his military leaders about the options he faced, including the ramifications of further delaying the deadline of May 1. He pressed his intelligence professionals on whether it was feasible to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan and both defend them against a renewed Taliban onslaught and maintain a degree of stability in the country. The assessment from those intelligence professionals was that the United States would need to send more American troops into harm’s way to ensure our troops could defend themselves and to stop the stalemate from getting worse. As Secretary Austin testified on September 28, 2021, “If you stayed [in Afghanistan] at a force posture of 2,500, certainly you’d be in a fight with the Taliban, and you’d have to reinforce yourself.” Chairman Milley testified on September 29, 2021, “There’s a reasonable prospect we would have to increase forces past 2,500, given the Taliban very likely was going to start attacking us.” There were no signs that more time, more funds, or more Americans at risk in Afghanistan would have yielded a fundamentally different trajectory. Indeed, the speed with which the Taliban took over the country showed why maintaining 2,500 troops would not have sustained a stable and peaceful Afghanistan.

 

[GoldenBoy89]

Funny, I consider the whole 20 year fiasco to be the actual blunder. We hear so much about the 13 who died on the last day but almost nothing about the several thousand lost throughout this pointless conflict. Let’s not even speak on the millions who’ve died or been displaced as a result of our disastrous foreign policy. Making this a partisan issue is just falling into a trap.

 

[Pommer]

Funny, I consider the whole 20 year fiasco to be the actual blunder. We hear so much about the 13 who died on the last day but almost nothing about the several thousand lost throughout this pointless conflict. Let’s not even speak on the millions who’ve died or been displaced as a result of our disastrous foreign policy. Making this a partisan issue is just falling into a trap.

I think Colin Powell was speaking of Iraq when he made his “Pottery Barn” remarks, (“you break it, you ‘bought’ it.”) But the principle applies for Afghanistan, too.

So it turned out that having a “foreign policy” that assumed “freedom loving peoples” would choose the war-bringing foreign devils “friends” to infect “grace one’s land” with Democracy, (the system that allows the stupid to have a say!), over their homegrown adversaries, seemed “optimistic”.

 

[Valletta]

The fact is both Trump and Biden were committed to leave Afghanistan. Had Trump won a 2nd term, he would have been facing the same constraints that Biden did. The US failed to appreciate how quickly the Afghan government and military would fold. And when that become apparent, the US was in no position to respond. Neither leader was going to send in 5-10 thousand US troops back to Afghanistan to secure our exit. It simply was not politically feasible after so many years of lost American lives.

First of all, the Biden transition people time after time refused to meet with Trump's people about Afghanistan. The Trump people sent them the intelligence records anyways. Let us recall that Joe scrapped as many Trump policies as he could get away with. President Trump had warned the Taliban that if they killed one American or seized any territory that the U.S. would reign destruction down upon their leader's village. Once Biden became president the Taliban started taking territory and once Joe did nothing they seized more and more. Your assumption about what Trump would have done is pure speculation and not supported by Trump's history. We know Joe was warned how quickly the Afghanistan army would collapse, here is an NBC report lest we move too quickly in this history rewrite:

CIA warned of rapid Afghanistan collapse. So why did U.S. get it so wrong?

With U.S. officials struggling to explain why America’s longest war ended in chaos, a series of interviews revealed there’s plenty of blame to go around.

www.nbcnews.com

There is blood on Joe's hands, he has himself to blame, and it is despicable of Joe to try and blame someone else.

 

[essentialsaltes]

First of all, the Biden transition people time after time refused to meet with Trump's people about Afghanistan.

Chuckle.

Pentagon blocked Biden's intelligence transition team from meeting with agencies

This doesn't make the nation safer. The Trump administration prevented President-elect Joe Biden's transition team from meeting with its counterparts at Pentagon intelligence agencies this week, according to a former senior intelligence official familiar with intelligence transition...

www.christianforums.com

 

[Pommer]

First of all, the Biden transition people time after time refused to meet with Trump's people about Afghanistan

Have ye a source for this lovely tidbit?

 

[USincognito]

First of all, the Biden transition people time after time refused to meet with Trump's people about Afghanistan.

That is a falsehood. Literally the opposite it was happened. Donald was convinced his electoral shenanigans were going to keep him in office and there was no reason to do a transition.

 

[mindlight]

WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. review led by the National Security Council of the chaotic 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan largely lays the blame on former President Donald Trump, saying President Joe Biden was “severely constrained” by the decisions of his predecessor.

12 page summary

Both Trump and Biden agreed on the need to withdraw. But Trump did what he could to make Biden's management of that as difficult as possible. Trump also seems to have utterly ignored the Afghans that were so helpful to the Coalition administration of the country for two decades. He would have been happy to abandon them and had hollowed out the necessary departments managing that.

There seems to be an admission of a major intelligence failure here about the speed at which the Taliban would take Kabul. The intelligence community was out by about a year. There was a serious overestimation of the Afghan security forces' size and capabilities also. Indeed the transparent approach Biden has taken to the Ukraine conflict seems to be a lesson learned from the failures of the Afghan withdrawal and the filtering of intelligence information. It replaces the "chinese whispers" of the Afghan intelligence approach which dismally failed and distorted the intelligence stream with an approach that allows more people to come to the best conclusions about the facts.

This could have been a lot worse had it not been for the fact that the Taliban broadly honored the arrangement. Strategically the withdrawal opens up the area to China and its silk roads project, maybe there is a loss of some potential rare earth resources also. But overall the place was a money pit and the fact that the Taliban were able to take over so quickly speaks volumes about the character of the Afghan people. The costs clearly outweighed the advantages of staying toward the end so it was right to withdraw.