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But, for the adults in the room (and I use this term loosely since I'm including myself), what could we, as the US, do now or could have done in the last couple of weeks to make this different?
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Short answer, nothing IMO. Once we established that the troops were going to be completely gone by 9/11, it confirmed to the Taliban knew they had free reign in the country.
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Coming into 2021, what was the best way, out of a lot of bad options, to deal with the hand dealt? It seems to me, we're weighing our own security and the human rights violations against our own other security interests and the wellbeing of our soldiers and treasury.
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The only thing that might have worked better was to make the pull out date announcement on Inauguration Day, inject thousands of forces into the region with in 48 hours to secure our interests and those Afghans that worked with us within Kabul and immediately begin shipping people out. That is not realistic though so the true answer is probably the best was out of all the bad options.
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Lastly, I really am having a hard time with the "this country just wants Taliban rule" line of thought. For some segment of the population, sure, but for the whole country, writ large?
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Well given that we are wedded to the binary in so many ways, it's either they just wanted Taliban rule OR they wanted democracy in the way we see it. They did not accept the second option so they HAD to have wanted the first option. There are no other acceptable answers.