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Imagine being such a horrible president (Biden) that you actually make someone like Trump look smart.
In fairness to Biden, the plan was never for civilians and equipment to go first, last, or in between. They'd simply stay and carry on under the Ghani regime, so the military was the *only* group supposed to exit.
So much for the plan.
@khird This is true, but we knew very early on that wasnt happening, and yet he kept withdrawing troops and not focusing ont he civilians. So while I might cut him some slack early on in the evacuation, by the end he really dropped the ball.
> we knew very early on that wasnt happening
I don't think we did though. Even up until the fall of Kabul, the projections were for a months-long holdout with the Ghani regime controlling the airspace, which would've given ample time to evacuate or organise a counteroffensive. A week prior to that, they were expected to control most of the major cities indefinitely.
Should he have had the military try and retake the country for a month to give everyone time to get out? I don't know what his other options would have been.
@khird I cant speak for if they had really shitty projections. But I was following the statistics and saw things fallying **really** fast. Literally the moment we would pull out of a region it would fall.
I dont know how they could possibly project that, at least to me seemed obvious ever step of the way where this was headed.
@khird I can understand that mistake as well, early on.. but like i said, once they saw the Taliban taking over almost immediately after they pulled back in each sector they should have reconsidered their assumptions. So bad intel or not, that is still on the military and Biden. Also the very fact they didn't have good intel at all is already the military's fault and not really an excuse.
@khird @freemo
My understanding is that it's overestimating the defending forces and underestimating the Taliban. From what I heard, the govt and military just keeled over without a fight. The brother of the former president even invited the Taliban to stay at his mansion. Basically, there was no fight to have because there was little to no resistance to the Taliban.
@freemo I don't know how they got the numbers they did. I see some things that suggest they underestimated the foreign support the Taliban had been receiving, and so the strength of the advance was significantly higher that the assessments would have suggested.
> In a stunning rout, the Taliban seized nearly all of Afghanistan in over a week, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the U.S. and NATO over nearly two decades to build up Afghan security forces. Just days earlier, *an American military assessment estimated it would be a month* before the capital would come under insurgent pressure.
https://cbc.ca/1.6141568