If I thought that fmr Pres Trump had an ability to plan, I'd say that he intentionally set up Pres Biden to fail in the withdrawal.

And had Trump won in 2020, he would have finished the withdrawal exactly how he negotiated the deal with the Taliban, even more recklessly because he would have made the military do it sooner (the agreement was for complete pullout by May 2021).

And when the fubar eventually happened, Trump would have laid full blame on the generals - just like he did with the first military action he took after becoming President which cost the life of a Navy Seal.

#17. Biden/Harris had 100% control over how the ending was carried out. Cope and deal with it.

Trump set the conditions that Biden had to function under. Trump lowered our troop level to 2500 before he left office. The Generals told Trump that they needed at least 4500 troops to pull out successfully, but he wouldn't listen.

It's amazing how easily you adopt Trump's infantile mindset. If this were analogized to a chess match, Trump opened the game and promptly lost his queen, a bishop, and both knights while only capturing a couple pawns from the Taliban. Then he left this board for Biden to finish the game, while alter kvetching that Biden lost the game. This is Trump's history in a nutshell. He makes an unholy mess of a situation and leaves the denouement to others and then complains about the often lousy finish.

You can only play with the cards you're dealt - to mix metaphors. You cannot assign 100% blame to either player and you absolutely cannot blame the one following another's lead without any ability to start the entire process back from square one.

This is why those that know are making the opposite case of our leading poster who doesn't know Jack ----- from shinola.

while alter

while afterwards ....

For the syrupeans, it means she tried to take credit for it, so she rightly deserves to be attached to it's failure.

Being the "last one in the room" only means that the President will seek her counsel before making his final decision. She has the last chance to make her case, but it doesn't mean that her viewpoint will be the one the President chooses. And if he chooses something she didn't like or would have seen go another way, it's still her job to tell the public that she supports the President's decision without ever wavering from it come hell or high water.

That is simply what Vice Presidents do, that is one of the few defined jobs that they have.

And lastly, the part of this argument that is missing is this: Given the same conditions and the same options from the military charged with completing the mission, what precisely would Trump have done differently and how does he deduce that his way would have repelled the bomb attack? It's not like the brass designed different withdrawal plans for Biden than they had for Trump if he remained President. And Trump knows this, and uses the public's ignorance to his political advantage.

It's easy to criticize without offering alternatives, but it's far worse to leave someone else with your pile of crap and then blame them for the smell after you're gone.

PS: The only correct answer based on what we know would have been having more troops in Afghanistan to provide the level of security that wouldn't have allowed the bomber the access that he got. And in no world was Biden going to send more troops BACK into Afghanistan for the ones Trump prematurely removed, which became even less possible because we could no longer support Bagram Airbase - which was far more secure than Kabul International - due to lack of manpower because of Trump's withdrawals prior to his leaving office.

If I know Kamala Harris' personal fastidiousness, Trump might be walking into a ticking timebomb of his own if he he tries to gaslight America like Strawlighter is gaslighting us on this thread:

So Trump is ALSO (and maybe even more so) responsible for the deaths of those 13 Americans by his own actions as President.

Exactly.

And the worst part? The media continues to allow Trump every opportunity to gaslight voters and even the families of victim soldiers, placing all the blame on Biden when he's the one who set forth the conditions for the Taliban takeover which allowed them to release the very bomber who attacked their loved ones.

And all in service of The Big Lie. Trump refused to allow Biden's transition team to interact with ANY government agencies or personnel until after he was inaugurated. Again, he put his own personal agenda ahead of not only the Constitution, but also our troop's safety and wellbeing.

I hope Harris prosecutes him tonight like nobody's ever seen.

And let us not forget these inconvenient facts:

It was a tie. Literally the only way VP can vote in the Senate is by being the deciding vote. And that was her.

This is how privileged today's Trump-led Republican Party is in the unending demand for minority rule - by THEM.

They never consider any majority against what they want to be legitimate, no matter how overwhelming, and especially so when votes are tight.

How in the world would anyone think that it's a fault for a Vice President to exercise her constitutional role as the Senate tiebreaker? You'd think that she was the one who violated the Constitution if you only listened to them.

One of which turned out to be the actual bomber that killed 13 American soldiers.

That's not exactly right as I know it, but it's close. The bomber wasn't one of the 5000, but he was released by the Taliban only 2 weeks before the bombing, when they took over the government as the 300,000 Afghani troops we trained turned tail, leading to the elected government in Kabul to run for the hills as well. The Taliban took over the government without firing a shot in anger in Kabul.

Then, the head Taliban released prisoners that the elected government were holding in their prison. One of them was an ISIS-K member who then blew himself and many others in his suicide bombing.

blew up

If he and the 5000 hadn't been released (at least until we were gone) those Americans would most likely still be alive.

Oh, it's all on Trump. He pulled the pin out of the grenade and handed it to Biden.

I may have mistaken the timeline but he was one of the prisoners released and there is no way we should have ever trusted them or given them such a free rein at the end.

I think you're conflating the situation. The government in Kabul that we've propped up for 20 years FLED. We were no longer fighting alongside them against the Taliban out in the provinces. There was open public discussion on how long they'd last before the Taliban advanced to Kabul. So the Afghani army figured out that they were dying for an already dead government and simply quit fighting and went home. So the Taliban took Kabul weeks before the estimated dates and replaced the old government.

That's how they came to releasing the prisoners that weren't a part of the negotiated Trump deal since we thought the old government would have kept them under lock and key until after we'd left. This was all a part of the Doha agreement that Trump negotiated which did get the Taliban to stop targeting the troops we had left in country. So the Taliban was already in control of Kabul and the country's infrastructure and government during the entirety of our evacuation process.

#79

Exactly. Except Trump left no plans whatsoever because he never approved any - or if he did, they didn't share them with Biden.

Trump set the conditions, troop levels, and by proxy our ability to defend and protect the 2500 left if the Taliban reneged and decided to attack us again.

Biden/Harris we're not bound by any of Trump's agreements. Biden/Harris were advised by military leaders that in order to have an orderly withdrawal mor3 troops needed to be deployed and keeping Bagram secure was critical. They were completely ignored by Biden/Harris.

This is what constrained Biden's choices vis-a-vis troop levels after his inauguration:

As a result, when President Biden took office on January 20, 2021, the Taliban were in the strongest military position that they had been in since 2001, controlling or contesting nearly half of the country. At the same time, the United States had only 2,500 troops on the ground - the lowest number of troops in Afghanistan since 2001 - and President Biden was facing President Trump's near-term deadline to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 2021, or the Taliban would resume its attacks on U.S. and allied was clear, that if we did not leave in accordance with that agreement, the Taliban would recommence attacks on our forces."

Just where is a more preferable option you seem to think Biden should have chosen?

You're a moron Strawlighter. Reality is calling and you refuse to answer because you exist in fantasy land. It's sad actually.

Bye bye.

The Taliban had no ability to do anything other than guerilla war stuff and probably weren't going to try with an increased troop presence explicitly there to properly manage the withdrawal.

Wanna know why there were hoards of Afghanis hanging onto our planes as they tried to take off because they couldn't get visas to legally enter the US?

When President Biden took office, the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program for Afghans who had worked with our soldiers and diplomats required a 14-step process based on a statutory framework enacted by Congress and involved multiple government agencies.

The Trump Administration's disregard and even hostility toward our commitment to Afghan allies led to a massive backlog of over 18,000 SIV applicants. Despite drawing down troops and committing to a full withdrawal, the departing Trump Administration had all but stopped SIV interviews. Refugee support services had been gutted and personnel dramatically reduced, lowering admissions to historic lows and forcing more than 100 refugee resettlement facilities in the United States to close.

And the Federal career workforce had been hollowed out. In November 2020, as President Biden was preparing to take office, the Department of State employed 12 percent fewer employees than it had four years earlier, leaving critical gaps.

Immediately after taking office - and even before he had made a final decision to leave Afghanistan - President Biden instructed departments and agencies to begin doing the necessary work to increase capacity, in part to facilitate a withdrawal on the timeline required. During his first two weeks in office, President Biden signed Executive Order 14013 requiring departments and agencies to surge resources and streamline the application process for SIV applicants. On February 2, the Department of State resumed SIV interviews in Kabul. State doubled the number of SIV adjudicators at Embassy Kabul and quintupled the number of staff processing SIV applications - from 10 to 50 - in Washington, D.C. As a result of this surge, the United States went from issuing 100 SIVs a week in March to more than 1000 a week in July, and, working with Congress to streamline the process, reduced the average SIV processing time by more than one year. In July, the United States issued a record number of SIVs to our Afghan allies and began running the first ever SIV relocation flights.