Don’t tar and feather me for what I’m about to say, there is a method to the madness, I swear lmao!
But I actually hope the rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan is because the government has credible evidence that another country is posturing in such a way that they believe an attack on the US or an ally is imminent and they want to consolidate our forces to better fend off such an attack, you know like what China and Russia have been doing the past 5-6 months……
That’s pretty much the only reason I can fathom that would make me pause and consider if that would even excuse the insanely of what they’ve done.
I doubt it. As a practical matter, it has been reported that there were very few troops (2k-3K) still left on the ground there anyway, and I think they were almost all at the airport already. There was just a shadow force winding down the U.S. mission and supporting the embassy security forces. And they are now sending in more troops (like 6k or so) to try to finish evacuating folks than there were left there (2k-3k) at the beginning of this fiasco. So there is no apparent imminent or immediately pressing security need elsewhere.
The simple fact is that sleepy Joe and company tried to pull a PR stunt by accelerating (and leaking via the "peace process") the complete evacuation date to the first week of September in order to say that he got us out before the 20 year anniversary of 9/11. However, the Taliban has been preparing for this moment ever since the pullout began. They'd infiltrated and subverted the Afghan military leadership from the very beginning and had long ago secured their allegiance (or at least neutrality) for when the U.S. left. We've been training and equipping their fighters for this moment for years. Once the Taliban leadership knew exactly when we were leaving (and beyond the tipping point to defend Kabul), they took the opportunity to flash the Bat signal to their local fighters and crash the party.
This is a very important semantical PR victory for the Taliban, because they can now say that they didn't have to wait for the U.S. to leave to take the country, but that they took the country while the U.S. was still there, and the U.S. could do nothing to stop it. And by extension, the U.S. now needs their permission and cooperation to leave (without further bloodshed/conflict). You can read between the lines, that the U.S. is having to negotiate its final exit, and give up more and more concessions to the Taliban in order to do so. We are now forced to say "mother may I" and leave under THEIR terms, not ours. This is why the Taliban is playing nicey-nicey right now in the media and saying they are giving safe passage to the airport for U.S. citizens and collaborators. This is also probably why those airstrikes that were set to destroy all that leftover high tech military equipment (planes, helicopters, Bradleys, etc.) in Mazar e Sharif, Jalalabad, etc. got called off at the last minute. My money is that the Taliban told sleepy Joe that if we tried to destroy that captured equipment, they'd overrun the airport and the embassy - but if we left it alone, they'd stay outta the embassy and the U.S. portion of the airport until 9/11 (or whatever date they negotiated) and let us slink out of the country and take our trash with us.
