A recent letter had, itself, many shortcomings (“Afghanistan events show Biden and his administration are ineffective at best,” Sept. 15).
First, American involvement in Afghanistan began a long time ago with former President George W. Bush (a Republican) — not Joe Biden — and passed through the administrations of Barack Obama (a Democrat) and Donald Trump (another Republican), so you need to take into account the decisions and actions these administrations made, too, and not just blame everything on Biden.
Second, the letter made a lot of judgments about Biden’s role without a single mention of the radical decisions or poorly thought out actions that former President Trump initiated in Afghanistan. But a good place to start is the text of the written agreement between the Taliban and the Trump administration. It was dated Feb. 29, 2020, well before Biden’s inauguration. I found it easily on the internet (at the U.S. Department of State website). I saw no evidence of redactions in it, either.
That agreement is four pages long and actually quite easy to read. To be fair, however, one should look and compare Biden’s actions with the Trump-Taliban agreement. Trump just “gave the store away for free” to the Taliban. That agreement really sounded to me more like a “surrender and abandon” announcement. As I read those four pages, I saw that there were many details that were left out, and that always leads to misunderstandings and trouble. Looks to me like Biden’s problems were really caused by Trump’s hasty bad decisions and low-quality recommendations by his advisers.
Third, the author of that Sept. 15 letter scolds everyone because we fail to learn from history, and that guarantees that we will repeat the same mistakes. Let me ask the author — and everyone else, too: Why did we not learn from our experience from our failed involvement in the Vietnam War (which also involved both Republican and Democratic administrations and also ended as a “surrender and abandonment”), so we didn’t repeat them? And our military involvement in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan — besides getting Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein — was not exactly outstanding, either.
Arthur E. Sowers
Harbeson
