Sean Davis retweeted Max Abrahms who retweeted this guy.

Actually, I agree with you that the ceasefire was a betrayal. But by then the American public had very much soured on the war and Nixon wanted to hurry things up.

Also, didn’t Nixon secretly pledge to give the South a lot of support if the North attacked? But Watergate ultimately intervened.

Our overnight abandonment of Bagram meant the Afghan troops no longer had any air cover at all, so they melted into the night lest they be killed in combat. But the Taliban will hunt them down and kill them, nevertheless, as they will interpreters and others on the biometric profile list Biden gifted the Taliban. Along with untold billions worth of military equipment.

We, no, the Democratic Congress, not we the people, blew Vietnam.
We blew Iraq because of MSM/Democrat hysteria over Abu Graib, a truly trivial occurrence.
Now we’ve blown Afghanistan.
Taiwan is probably next.

We have Joint Chiefs of Staff who are rotten soldiers who do not know how to fight. We have a black SecDef whose greatest concern on taking that office was “systemic racism” in the military, though he himself had achieved the rank of General.
We have a Sec. of State, Blinken, a former nothing, who makes Hillary look thoughtful and conscientious.

We have become just another crappy socialist country. Defense budgeting is squeezed by the inexorable demands of the ever-expanding entitlement programs. If that’s not socialism, I do not know what is.

Richard Aubrey:

That was some of my impression. Certainly in Iraq where Colin Powell stated the “Pottery Barn Rule”* — “You broke it, you bought it.” It seemed to me that some of that rubbed off on Afghanistan. I think we were also playing to the UN.

neo has looked into Afghanistan deeper than I have. Perhaps she has some thoughts.
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*Amusingly enough, Pottery Barn denied the “Pottery Barn Rule” was true of their stores.

Please see this post about the last years of the Vietnam War.

Re the Whitlock book – I have read about the war in Afghanistan for 20 years, and I don’t think anyone really believed we were “winning” there in any real way, whatever the propaganda was. I think most people felt it was stalemated, had helped some of the people of Afghanistan (especially the women), and had prevented large-scale terrorist attacks like 9/11, and that was about all we could hope for. A majority of Americans felt we should get out, and under Trump we were almost all out.

The author of that book clearly wanted it to be like the Pentagon Papers – for example, the title. The MSM’s glory days. I just don’t see that what he’s saying is news – if he’s saying the government painted a considerably rosier picture of what was going on in Afghanistan than what was actually happening there, then didn’t everyone pretty much know that already?

By the way, the Pentagon Papers were somewhat mischaracterized by the MSM to make the government look worse. I wrote a post on that – you can find it here.

And if that writer has no idea why we stayed in Afghanistan, I can answer that question: to prevent it from becoming a terrorist stronghold and center again for attacks.

I’m sure that over time, other reasons came to be part of the reason we stayed. For example, our presence there was lucrative for some people and some companies. Also, there were aspects of “nation-building” (such as more liberty, particularly for women) that appeal to Americans. But the basic reason we didn’t leave shortly after getting rid of the Taliban, and why we tried to “nation-build” in the first place, was to keep the Afghanistan from becoming a big terrorist base again.

The Taliban certainly seemed to understand that, because one of the first things they did was release the prisoners held at Bagram.

Now, it can certainly be argued that our presence in Afghanistan wasn’t worth it, that in the end we would have to leave and it would revert again, etc. etc.. But to state categorically, as that writer did, that it wasn’t in our interest to stay after the initial fighting, is to be ignorant of many of the reasons we stayed and that some of them (preventing of large-scale terrorist attacks such as 9/11) seem to have been successful.

In addition, Richard Aubrey makes some good points in the comment above this one.