Now the women and children will be raped and unfree, ideologically and religiously different killed, and LGBT tortured.
We shouldn't have been there, but this is a horrible outcome far worse than staying.
I find the "but they won't defend themselves" argument abhorrent and totally unsympathetic. I can't imagine if I were in their shoes.
You mean it's going to return to what it was before the US got involved.
The US attempted to prop up the ~300,000 person Afghan national military. The majority of the people of Afghanistan clearly had no interest in defending anything or keeping anything. It folded instantly, with close to zero resistance, despite outnumbering the Taliban four to one, having control of the skies and superior weaponry. The US can't reasonably stay in Afghanistan forever to defend the 3% of the population that aligns ideologically with Western values.
The next thing the US should do is to immediately proceed to close over half of its foreign military bases and start leaving other countries as well.
> I find the "but they won't defend themselves" argument abhorrent and totally unsympathetic.
They won't fight for Western values - which the US attempted to force on them - because they overwhelmingly don't agree with or believe in Western values. They don't have a fervor for those beliefs, whereas the Taliban do have a fervor for their beliefs. It is that simple, whether you find reality abhorrent or not. The best anyone can hope for is that as many as possible of the small minority of people in Afghanistan that do want those values, are able to flee the country.
That's an incredible geopolitical farce. Putin would love it.
The United States cannot become isolationist, lest it risk its economy, dollar trade, and geopolitical edge. Adversarial nations would gladly step in to fill the void, and our allies would be at a loss.
The "America is evil and incompetent" meme is atrocious.
We can't pay our bills properly. When as a nation your central bank has to buy your own debt because nobody else can afford to buy so much garbage paper, you clearly can't afford such irresponsible foreign adventurism.
Enough is enough. Time to go home. Time to reduce military spending immediately. Time to stop playing at nation building. Time to stop pretending we can afford to be a globally deployed military superpower, as though WW3 is going on and we have to be at max defense spending.
The US couldn't afford Afghanistan 15 years ago. It most certainly can't afford it now.
And yes, it was occupation. One thing that the rapid collapse made clear, is that Taliban genuinely has plenty of popular support, and the US-backed government had very little. Keep in mind that ANA had three times as much manpower as the Taliban, and military equipment supplied by US - and yet it all just dissipated in less than two weeks, because, apparently, no-one was actually willing to fight.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/afghanistan/freedom-world/2...
I mean seriously, this argument holds no weight whatsoever. No one ever intended to stay there forever. But maybe "stay there long enough to help the government be resistant to religious zealots willing to die to subdue non-believers"? That seems like a pretty damn low-bar.