What are your feelings on the Afghanistan withdrawal?

I feel that it's time we lost a lot of people,for a sinceless cause, that country been in crisis and civil war since the beginning of time.i understand the meaning of the mission, But who are we to judge,our country is in disarray we need to clean up our own backyard, while we trying to cut the neighbors.

I have some thoughts, I thought the Bush administration passed legislation to allow translators in, 20 years later it is still jacked the frack up? Fault: The American Politician (all of you in Washington, from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave down for the last 4 administrations). Americans in Afghanistan...what part of "were leaving didn't you understand? Fault: American Citizens and Politicians Failure of the Afghan military: Fault Previous President for fracking them over "making a deal," with the Taliban. Well your deal fracked a lot of people. Afghan's corrupt leadership, American military leadership telling us they were ready (ready for what Girl Scout smore campouts?).

We have (according to a quick Google search) about 320,000 service members in Europe, and another 80,000 in Japan and Korea. So of our 1.3m total active duty members, nearly a third are OCONUS, and mostly in countries that were not our allies when we first arrived. We had dwindled down to 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, but trained the ANA to fight with US/Coalition support. From everything I've seen it sounds like all of our 20 years of training them to care for themselves, was predicated on being able to call in close air support and artillery when needed. What we, the Afghans, and everyone else needed was a solid plan for a transition, time to adjust training, and for the time table to not be dictated by former leaders or the enemy. We promised the people who attacked us at Pearl Harbor we would defend them indefinitely. Can we not now promise the Afghan people that we will have their backs? Biden spoke of "over the horizon" capabilities. Why can't anyone come out and pledge that there will forever be an American boot eternally in search of terrorists? Why could we not pledge that in our own national interest we would not allow the Taliban, or any other extremist group, to gain strategic control of lands and resources, capable of developing a national threat?

Even a PFC could have figured out civilians first, then equipment and troops last ... and secure the Embassy or destroy it. The whole operation was a slap in the face of every American.

When RVN ended I was shocked having been 11Bravo there. But this, give me a break. We have to hear how British special forces are going about the country getting their citizens out. And our citizens have to hope they can get to the airport. WTF has this country turned into. Pissed is an understatement.

I never served in Afghanistan, so I have less of a perspective. I do draw on those I know who have been there, as well as what we see in public reports, and of course the media which is usually skewed.

From what I know and have observed we have failed in our withdrawal, or there really was no plan to begin with. As for the war... We are to blame in part on not coming up with a true purpose beyond some broad objectives, and additionally not preparing the ANA well enough for our departure which resulted in them losing logistics and intelligence support.

Additionally the Afghan government and military is to blame for a variety of reasons among which are corruption, abuse of Civilians and lower ranking Soldiers, failure to pay their Soldiers resulting in the sale of military equipment and increased support for the Taliban and similar terrorist organizations. As a side note, I find it interesting that they boasted around 1,000 or more general officers but had no strong rank structure advancement for the enlisted Soldier. Not unlike the British model used by many militaries around the world.

Finally, after 20 years we have done little to anything to truly influence the culture of the Afghan people as is evident by how quickly their society fell to a force of 80,000 or so Taliban. They do not have the will to throw off the shackles of anyone who chooses to oppress them.

For these reasons it is enough for us to leave them to their own devices, the withdrawal however is as evident a failure in planning. There are too many variables not accounted for including Americans who may not be able to leave the country unmarked if at all let alone interpreters, approved Afghans, and any third country contractors that aided us.