All things Middle East related

[SunnySide]

President Biden made 3 points, among many, yesterday that i didnt consider.

1. Taliban was doing a "ceasefire" for the past year or so bc they were promised a May 1, 2021 withdrawl. So if we decided to stay and break our agreement .. it wouldnt have been under the ceasefire environment we saw the past year or so but an all out attack.

2. When he said "its not a foregone conclusion the Taliban would take over", that was a diplomatic response and requested by Afghanistan leaders as to avoid a "crisis of confidence". I think President Biden knew the Taliban would take over, not that quickly but he knew it was days not months.

3. They way the ANA and its generals folded and bribed away = proof of exactly why it was the right choice to get out.

----------------------------

When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021 — just a little over three months after I took office.

U.S. forces had already drawn down during the Trump administration from roughly 15,500 American forces to 2,500 troops in country, and the Taliban was at its strongest militarily since 2001.

The choice I had to make, as your President, was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.

There would have been no ceasefire after May 1. There was no agreement protecting our forces after May 1. There was no status quo of stability without American casualties after May 1.

There was only the cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict.

I stand squarely behind my decision. After 20 years, I’ve learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces.

That’s why we were still there. We were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency.

But I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you. The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.

So what’s happened? Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.

If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.

American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong — incredibly well equipped — a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-...n-afghanistan/


Either recommit 20,000 plus troops to fight a strengthened Taliban (strengthened under Trumps watch) .. or get the hell out of there.

President Biden came out strong last night.