Exiting after 20 years in Afghanistan is a good choice; if we couldn't build a strong US-backed government there in two decades, we never could. The issue that

Exiting after 20 years in Afghanistan is a good choice; if we couldn't build a strong US-backed government there in two decades, we never could. The issue that everybody has is the scrambled and disorganized form of the exit, and that's what the administration is receiving bipartisan flak over. Biden said "this is not Saigon, there will be no helicopters evacuating people from the roofs of embassies," and that is exactly what occurred. This should've been higher on the administration's priority list, and evacuations should have begun much sooner. Here's just a couple of the blaring issues: - US forces should have protected Bagram air base from being surrendered to the Taliban, as it was much more defensible and capable of this scale of evacuations, and we would not be running so close to the August 31st deadline while also failing to evacuate Afghan nationals. - General McKenzie should have stayed in Afghanistan to manage the operations rather than exiting early to CENTCOM in Tampa; our presence completely deteriorated without an effective chain of command. - Maybe we could have spent the past few months working harder to give the Afghans better intelligence capabilities (intel and air support mattered more than our troops on the ground), and ensuring our own intelligence was accurate, as we failed to detect the Taliban's offensive plans.