I wrote about the withdrawal from Afghanistan yesterday. There were several points I should have made.
First, the decision to leave was correct. The policy of previous administrations of both parties was disastrous. I know the current narrative is that we either had to have this fiasco or we needed to stay with increased forces. That is a false choice. We needed to leave but we owed many people there the protection that we failed to get them.
I do think the soldiers there were courageous. Our men and women in uniform usually are. We did get a large number of people out, but I think it was fair to expect better from this administration.
Abandoning a country after propping up corrupt leaders for 20 years is bound to be messy and chaotic. We have a President who was willing to act decisively. His decision to leave was correct but the way it happened was awful, despite the heroic efforts by many during the final days.
Will our leaders and the mandarins that shape our foreign policy learn anything from this? I hope so.
I think we need a public accounting for what happened. Unfortunately, the effort will involve finger pointing and scoring of political points to narrow constituencies.
We should hope that the ideas that led us to this point will be challenged and not as political rhetoric but rather as a reflective exercise about how we see America going forward and our role in the world.
We can do better than this.
From This Corner 
Your comments are always correct and fair. Really enjoy reading your blog.
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Thank you for those precisions Allan. However I still disagree with you. 1. Putting the knife in Biden’s back and focusing on the last 2 or weeks of this war gives cover to those people who seek to hide their failures of policy, not only of the last 20 years but all the way back to Reagan helping the Mujahaddin.Just listen to the media. Is what happened with the evacuation worse that all the drones, the bombings, the night raids, the more than 120,000 Afghans we killed or whose death we are responsible for? 2. Yes, US soldiers acquitted themselves heroically during the evacuation given the circumstances they had to face. Could it have been better? Perhaps. So what were the options? Nobody knows. All the scenarios that have been presented by the experts in conflicts and refugees (from whom we don’t hear in the media) have concluded that the results would not have been better, in fact might have made things worse. As to the refugee visas, it is no secret that the immigration and State Department personnel who would normally process these have been reduced to a bare minimum. Furthermore there are still logistics to consider, for example seeking permission from neighboring countries to admit he applicants temporarily. 3. This insistence that the evacuation was one of the worst disasters in the history of the US is to continue with the illusion that, just because we have he biggest military of all time the US can control everything. It can’t. The evacuation is a metaphor for the general mess that the US as a superpower has made: it invades, occupies, creates a mess and leaves in a mess. Will the Washington establishment learn anything from all this? Of course not. We can already hear all the neo-conservatives and liberal hawks trying to double down on these failed policies and the media acquiescing.
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