- 18 Aug 2021 23:20
#15186204
I think it was a good idea to withdraw, just the execution was botched. Biden, in my view, made a persuasive argument for not pursuing a counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan at the time Obama ordered a troop surge to Afghanistan. Here is an article that discusses some of the deliberations that were made during the Obama Presidency where Biden offered his views.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/18/opinions ... index.html
I think Biden's views were correct during that time when the Obama Administration was making it's deliberations on whether to order a troop surge or not.
David Axelrod of CNN wrote:"Our objective in going there was to destroy al Qaeda so why the hell are we plunging into COIN here?" the vice president asked, using the acronym for the type of elaborate counter insurgency program the military was proposing. "The president asked me to play the bad cop here and that's what I'm going to do."
In sometimes heated exchanges over the coming weeks, Biden sharply questioned Gates and the military architects of the plan. Capturing Osama bin Laden and destroying al Qaeda should remain the focus, he argued, and could be accomplished with a much smaller counter-terrorism force in the region. To commit to a larger counter insurgency would bog us down in a costly, open-ended war.
Biden's passion sprung from hard experience. He entered the Senate during the final years of Vietnam, when that long and painful war was effectively lost but not over. He had cast a vote in 2002 authorizing the war in Iraq that he quickly came to regret.
In the end, Obama agreed to send 30,000 additional troops but with benchmarks, including for the training of Afghan military and police, and a timetable for winding down the surge and handing responsibility for defending Afghanistan to the Afghans.
It wasn't the outcome Biden had hoped for, and he bore some scars from the fight. The Allied Commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was fired after a reporter overheard the general's aides crudely ridiculing Biden in McChrystal's presence. Gates would write in his 2014 memoir that while Biden was "a man of integrity," who was "impossible not to like...he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."
I've thought a lot this week about the deliberations I witnessed.
The concerns Biden expressed then have been more than vindicated today. We did get bogged down in Afghanistan. Yes, there has been enormous progress there on some fronts — most notably for women and girls, who suffered under the Taliban's repressive rule. Yes, our own military served with extraordinary courage and sacrificed greatly to give Afghans the chance for freedom denied by a brutal and repressive theocracy.
Yet this wasn't the mission that drew us to Afghanistan. Bin Laden was captured and killed a decade ago. Al Qaeda has been degraded. And, after 20 years in which so much American blood has been spilled and treasure lost, it was time to pass the task of securing those gains on to the Afghans themselves.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/18/opinions ... index.html
I think Biden's views were correct during that time when the Obama Administration was making it's deliberations on whether to order a troop surge or not.
"I need ammunition, not a ride!" -Volodymyr Zelenskyy