The American people lost interest in Afghanistan as soon as the Iraq War began, and we only remembered that we still had troops there a few years ago.
We were never going to be successful in "nation building" there, by the way, because Afghanistan is not a "nation," it's a region where tribal loyalty dwarfs national unity. We were successful in Germany and Japan because those were coherent, unified countries. We wouldn't have been as successful with feudal Japan or Germany as recently as the 19th century if those two countries had been in those same states after World War Two.
We have no obligation to "rebuild" Afghanistan, other than providing humanitarian aid. There was no better chance of success if we stayed there another 6 months, or 6 years, or 60 years. Here's where we could have pulled out:
Bush, once the Taliban were toppled.
Obama, once bin Laden was killed.
Trump, once Abu-Bakr al Baghdadi was killed. Granted, he had nothing to do with Afghanistan, but most Americans don't understand that, so it would have been a good pretext.
Biden ripped off the bandaid. Yes, he screwed up by assuming that the Afghan army would hold off the Taliban, or more likely, that the Taliban would at least have the decency to wait until we were gone before conquering the entire country. Also, the mad scramble at the airport suggests that the Afghani people themselves didn't know the Taliban were going to take over that quickly, so how were we supposed to predict this? That being said, once Trump "negotiated" the "treaty" last year and withdrawal was inevitable, we should have been using that time to process visas for the people we wanted to save. It's too much to expect Trump to have done that, so Biden should have started the process.
