(04-14-2023, 01:17 PM)mikesez Wrote:

(04-14-2023, 12:54 PM)flsprtsgod Wrote: The one that will last the longest in my family is his abandonment of Afghanistan. The anger that my close veteran relatives feel over the mangling of our withdrawal is something that will not fade. It's a shame in our generation on par with the shame over the fall of Saigon and the images are just as imprinted in our memories as those helicopters over the embassy are to my father's generation. You probably don't comprehend that feeling in your bubble.

No, I also felt some kind of way about our Afghan "allies" yielding to the Taliban so quickly, not giving us enough time for an orderly exit. I feel really bad that a lot of those guys thought we would take them with us, and then we didn't.  Those two things go together, of course.  When it became clear that we weren't going to process their visas in time, they kinda stopped defending the presidential palace and airport in response.  And if we had processed more of their visas more expeditiously, then more of them would have been here when we were wrapping up, not there, and they also wouldn't have provided gate security during our evacuation.

I don't really blame Biden for that, sorry. 
It was up to the Afghans to form a mass of people who could fight the Taliban and who wished to remain in Afghanistan for that fight for the rest of their lives.  We had a mass of Afghans like that when we first got there.  But at some point before Bush left office, that was gone.