#2

She touched on it but she didn't go as deeply as she could. Both you and I know it would have come as a complete shock to 95% of last night's audience if Kamala had directly tied the suicide bomber to the Taliban releasing him from prison right before we pulled out. Because the army Trump depended upon to at least defend Kabul turned tail and ran, which allowed the Taliban to release an ISIS-K terrorist who promptly attacked our withdrawal.

And even deeper, the US military indeed had intel on this guy and our security forces were actively scanning the crowds looking for him. Trump simply didn't leave enough troops in Afghanistan before he left office to provide the level of security we needed, and Biden wasn't going to reintroduce troops back into Afghanistan for a withdrawal.

Trump rolled the dice and Biden was left to play the numbers as best he could with the resources and manpower available in country.

From the beginning, President Biden directed that preparations for a potential U.S. withdrawal include planning for all contingencies - including a rapid deterioration of the security situation - even though intelligence at the time deemed this situation unlikely. In March, before he had made his final decision, the President directed his top national security officials -including the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Director for National Intelligence - to begin withdrawal planning and account for a full range of contingencies. Once the President made his final decision, national security teams accelerated the planning that was already underway. Throughout the spring and summer, the National Security Council (NSC) staff hosted dozens of high-level planning meetings, formal rehearsals of the withdrawal, and tabletop exercises to explore scenarios for an evacuation as part of responsible planning for a range of contingencies, even those that were actually worse than the worst-case predictions.

Throughout this period, a Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) was treated as a distinct possibility and the national security team started planning for it. In March, departments and agencies were tasked with outlining plans for multiple scenarios, including a security environment that would require the departure of all U.S. personnel from Afghanistan. In April, departments and agencies were specifically tasked with updating the NEO planning documents. In May, NSC staff held a senior interagency meeting that included a discussion of several specific complex issues related to a NEO, including timing, evacuee destination sites, processing, vetting, and transport logistics.

President Biden took the advice of his military commanders on the tactical decisions regarding the operational retrograde of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, including the dates they closed facilities, and he regularly asked them if there was anything else they needed.

It was agreed that - because of the extreme complexity and careful planning required - a dedicated group of interagency experts would regularly convene to conduct NEO planning. In a meeting of national security leadership that same month, departments and agencies were tasked with ensuring relocation plans were ready in the event of a significant deterioration in the security situation. In line with that planning, in early summer, President Biden directed military assets to be prepositioned in the region to be able to help with an evacuation on short notice. It was this decision that later enabled the United States to respond and deploy quickly enough to facilitate the successful evacuation of over 124,000 American citizens, permanent
residents, Afghan partners, and allies.

Here's how the right wing lizard brain works.

1) US troops suffer a suicide bombing while trying to pull out of Afghanistan that cost 13 American lives and injured others out of 2500 troops then in country.

2) Since the bombing happened, it's the fault of the President who gave the orders. And it's also articulated that the said President was obviously derelict in his responsibility to protect American troops during any military action, as though the troops never knew what was coming at them.

3) Continue to drive the political narrative calling the President reckless and personally responsible for the deaths by bringing grieving families into the political process for your own benefit.

4) Refuse to even consider any actual facts and chronologies of the events leading up to said bombing, showing that the President and military did all due diligence in their planning - including worst case/emergency scenarios - but it simply wasn't enough this time.

And the most revealing fact that the Administration's and military's plans were more sound than questionable is that all the other troops out of the 2500 left in country were safely returned home!

It's tragic to lose any Americans to war. But a known bomber - freshly released from prison after the Taliban overran the allied government that simply fled from the inevitable - succeeded our best efforts to stop him in a massive hoard of desperate Afghanis trying to flee the Taliban. All of this happened as the end result of an agreement entered into by the former President effectively tying his successor's hands and limiting his options, where every single one ends in the Taliban re-engaging attacks on American troops unless we leave the country.

And then that President has the audacity and lack of character to politically place full blame upon his successor in a wholly mendacious manner, insinuating the bombing should have been stopped, without offering a shred of detail as to how that could have been done under the then-existent circumstances.

Republicans only care when it's politically convenient.

I'm surprised that no one in the media has yet focused on the fact Trump and his campaign are literal ghouls for using the tragic deaths of soldiers and others to forward their political agenda of blaming Biden for every tragedy that happened while he was President, ignoring that over 45 military were killed under Trump's presidency and he neither mentions nor grieves for any of them.

It's truly reprehensible, as the young father in Springfield publicly noted days ago when he called for right wingers to stop using his child's death in their anti-immigrant frenzied rantings.