Twenty years after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Taliban were back in power, after a war costing more than $2 trillion and taking the lives of 6,300 brave young service members and contractors from the US and its coalition partners.
The war was lost not because the Taliban were strong but because for 20 years it was not treated as a war but as a short-term intervention. Wise American officials had a saying: “It’s not year 20. It’s year one for the 20th time.”
President Biden has often spoken contemptuously about the capacity of our armed forces, saying that Afghanistan could not expect Americans to die in its cause if Afghans were not willing to fight. But what we see today in Afghanistan — along with the consequences in the wider world — is a direct result of a process that started with President Barack Obama and ended with Biden. Both leaders facilitated the fall and the rise of terrorism as a nation-state in Afghanistan.
Read the rest of the story at the New York Post.