Not sure if intentional, but note all the US gear. F-ing disgusting. A year later, no official report as to the failures and poor choices made by Brandon admin there? I agree for sure, as pretty much everyone does, that we were long over due to leave, but how we left, was a travesty and spit on the graves of the US service people lost, and tens thousands of civilians killed, time, and billions (trillions?) spent.
I'm no expert here, but my take is we should have kept the airport, continued to support their mil with CAS, kept SOF there, and advisors to assist their transition to self reliance, etc for another 1-2 years. That at least gave them the best possible chances of making the transition they needed to make. It would show the world we don't just pull up stake and leave due to political winds shifting so that no one trusts us, and that's exactly what happened. Seemed to me, there was not nearly as much kick back and ongoing criticisms from the GOP, mil, etc about that. Why?
Sure, very possible, if not likely, they'd still fall, but we guaranteed they would by leaving in the manner we did, and got more US service members killed, armed the chit heads, emboldened our enemies, etc, etc. Fail on top of fail in my view.
At the very least, we should have kept the airport until all troops, US citizens, Afgs who should have been taken with us who earned it, etc, then either set off pre set explosives, or done an old school Arc Light mission to assure that base and gear was utterly useless down to the molecular level...
It should be noted, Ash Hess, who spent a lot of time there, and a BTDT type, had a view that surprised me. Our interview HERE.
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