Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew from Afghanistan Was the Problem

Is there some reason this person would have a special insight into the Afghan situation? Did he spend time over there in the military or state department? Has he worked as a staffer in the Congress? And how did he get accepted into the UC system with a 2.2 GPA?

As a friend and godfather to people that have served in the area while working for the DoD or the State Dept, and as someone that lost two friends in SE Asia, I have been trying to get my head around this mess.

My ideal political or social news commentator -> brutally and fearlessly honest, STEM background, a stint in public service overseas, and very familiar with inside the beltway but not an insider. Does such a person exist?

The Taliban rolled in within what... hours?

Governments that fall that quickly are so corrupt, so incompetent, and so bankrupt (morally, etc) that they are ghosts.

It strangley is like the failed startup I saw once that had a big angel investor. (Yes I'm aware of the white privilege / valley-centric self-absorption that sentence is lathered in, this is kind of a joke comparison): No real products or ability to sustain ourselves long term, even with consulting. The C-suite was basically bullshitting projected sales and products to the angle investor corporation.

Eventually the corp pulled the plug because of course the C-suite "marketing campaign to the corp overlord" fell apart.

The Karzais haven't been running a government, they've been running a marketing campaign for a government-like product to sell to the US Military so they can get rich as the C-suite salaries.

I guess that story is lacking the utter corruption of the C-suite running a cocaine/prostitution/bitcoin mining farm for self-enrichment on the side on the company dime which would actually be what the Karzais were doing. Well, and a poor populace of users we had been carpet bombing their weddings.

But once the funding is gone, poof the startup is gone the next day. The Afghan government absolutely seemed like that.

So the weird thing is all the puff stories trying to give sympathy to all these government people. Come on, they, like I, knew the whole thing was a bankrupt exercise in monetary extraction well before it died. They knew what was coming, and arguably, like I, was complicit in the uh, "monetary extraction".

This didn't age well.