I don’t think most people are opposed to getting out of Afghanistan- except some war hawks and defense contractors. I am sure regardless of who was in charge and how things were done there would have been messy situations. The Taliban would have inevitably took over the country at some point.
But pulling out the contractors military before civilians and not notifying our partner forces? I’m by no means a military expert but don’t see how anyone could think pulling the military first was the intelligent thing to do. Evidently both the military and intelligence agencies warned of a rapid collapse and chaos if this course of action was taken. I have yet to hear a solid explanation defending not why we left, but why left the way we did. Maybe 11 days for things to implode was faster than expected, but not much faster than predictions as little as “weeks”. Apparently this wasn’t too much of a surprise for people who had actually dealt with the Afghan Army and police on the ground.
If Trump was still President and the conditions based withdrawal was indeed followed, we’d probably be in Afghanistan for the next 20 years…. or forever. I’m not sure there is a political solution to whatever it was we were trying to solve in Afghanistan. In that sense I don’t think leaving is unreasonable. But I think most people see the manner in which we left as disgraceful. And the polling clearly reflected that.
When the President says this won’t be another Saigon, then a day or so later you see people literally hanging from the side of C-17’s taking off and falling out of the sky to their death (or alternatively being crushed in the landing gear), the optics can’t get much worse than that.
