At some point in the future, I hope we have a president decent enough and honorable enough to apologize to the Afghan people and the Afghan armed forces, for comments made by Joe Biden yesterday.1 In defending his decision to leave Afghanistan and the way we are doing it, President Biden said:
“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. …
We gave them every tool they could need. …
We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.”
To say that, after we stopped providing close air support, logistics help, intelligence and surveillance, repair and maintenance assistance, rapid helicopter transport, and, perhaps most importantly, medevac units for wounded soldiers, is just mean. Whether the Afghan forces should have been able to do all of these things on their own, the point is that they weren’t to that point yet. And to now say that it’s their fault for not fighting when we have, on very short notice, taken all of this away is appalling.
The Afghan people, the Afghan forces, deserve an apology. Hopefully, we will someday have a president with enough decency and honor to give it.
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1 Obviously, Donald Trump made comments that need to be apologized for, but President Biden was supposed to be better.
UPDATE (8/19/21 10:35 pm): Fixed a typo in the penultimate paragraph.
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