We needed to exit but how it was done was a shit show. You’re just a Biden apologist now. Pretty sad.Nope. You are 40 or 41 and never served. When we went there it was for a specific mission to get Osama Bin Laden for the 9/11 attack on this country. It was a valid mission that had to be done, and the only mission sold to the citizens of this country when you were 20 or 21 years old.
Those of us older have seen mission creep in action before, and it usually only leads to higher profit for those selling the military weapons and services and more dead and injured soldiers on a mission changed from original intent.
In this case, we saw an addition war started in the region, mainly because the progress or lack there of on the Afghanistan mission was not, so we justified a mission to go after weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We didn't find them. If we had, it would have been front page news around the world, but it wasn't.
We then decided to completely topple the country, it's leadership, what was left of it's military, police and all civilian political organization and all existing military balances in the entire Middle East. Mission creep, again and nation building. Like I said mission creep is easy as all it takes is a lack of discipline of our civilian leadership, nation building, not so much. Some said the weapons of mass destruction may have gone to Syria, lets go there, too.
This rolling mission creep in the Middle East has been a rolling clusterfuck from the get go and the only ones making real progress were Haliburton and other defense contractors/suppliers, some startups, just because there was money to be made of the expanding endeaver as the American soldiers kept dying and being injured in this 20 year plus war, costing trillion$.
Through all of this, we kept the nation building going in Afghanistan and kept it palatable there with large amounts of money to and through that government, whose main source of income (biggest single domestic product and export) had been their opium exports of poison around the world. Twenty years later it is still their biggest export, last I heard.
Yes. We had to call a halt and get out. Disengaging and leaving a theater of battle (unless as victors) is always messy and expensive, with lots of opportunities to say we should have done this, or the plan should have accounted for that, but it had to be done and Biden was right to do it now in the first year of his presidency, no time like the present to do it and be done with it. We did it and only lost 13 more in a country where we had already lost 2,372 soldiers and 1,720 US contractor, many of which were former US soldiers, for a total of around 4,096 Americans and cost of $2.27 Trillion Dollar$.
So how many more did you want to sacrifice for the nation building. How many more Trillion$ did you want to spend to "help" them figure out who would control the Opium?