What party line would that be, out of curiosity? I find it interesting that basically the only real response I am getting on the Afghanistan issue is canned talking points from Facebook, and it's pretty obvious given the inability to actually extract them out.
Good grief. I'm not even
on Facebook; I think my account still exists, but I haven't logged into it in
years, or actively made use of it in a decade or more.
I'll break this down for you, as something that
anyone who has a basic grounding in tactics, strategy, and logistics, will be able to do.
When you are organizing an evacuation, especially one with a signed (and currently effective) cease-fire:
1. First is make sure you have the resources to pull out everyone and everything by the agreed-upon withdrawal date. (Biden screwed this up)
2. Start evacuating non-essential civilian personnel and material. (Biden screwed this up.)
3. Start evacuating tertiary support military personnel and hardware. This isn't your mechanics and your repair equipment, this is your clerks and record-keeping stuff. (Biden screwed this up)
4. Evacuate the rest of your civilian personnel and material. (Biden screwed this up.) A handful of people, such as the top-ranking local liaisons, may remain at this stage.
5. Evacuate secondary military personnel and hardware. This is all but a skeleton crew of technical support people, and all hardware that can't carry itself out of the area. (Biden screwed this up, especially with the early
and incomplete pull-out of Bagram.)
6. Evacuate everything except for the final duty shift, and all material they won't be carrying out with them. This happens in the last few days. Begin destruction of all equipment you aren't taking with you. (Biden screwed this up.)
7. The final shift leaves, carrying or destroying everything of any value that is left. (Biden screwed this up.)
The particularly infuriating thing about this, is that even with the first
half of the steps screwed up, if you get your shit together, and put every damn person and dollar you can behind the job, you can still finish the rest of it and get everyone and everything out,
or close enough to it, that you can still call the evacuation a success.
The thing is,
at no stage at all did the Biden presidency or the Pentagon display
any meaningful level of competence on this. They started
cooperating with the Taliban and
gave them lists of collaborators, while hiding behind the fences at the Baghdad airport.
Meanwhile, the
British were sending expeditions of their own soldiers out past the perimeter to collect
their citizens and local support staff. Which proves that it was
absolutely possible to do so.
The Biden administration failed the evacuation at
every single level, and to a degree that was absolutely mind-blowing. Even after Kabul had fallen, it was
entirely possible for the President to just throw men and money at getting every possible passenger and cargo aircraft into and out of Kabul airport, while having the Air Force and Navy Air Corps blomb all the military material that had been so incompetently abandoned.
But no.
None of that happened. And the Biden administration started
actively impairing efforts by private citizens to get more evacuation work done.
That is a breakdown for how badly things went.