The president testily replied: “I want to talk about happy things, man.”His retort seems to have had the desired effect. Last week, at a CNN town hall, the president wasn’t asked about Afghanistan at all. In his lecture titled “Decline is a choice,” Krauthammer said: “The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. Decline — or continued ascendancy — is in our hands.”To the extent he was right — and I think he was — our abandonment of Afghanistan was indeed our choice. In that context, what we’ve been doing the last couple of years in Afghanistan hasn’t been a war, but a counterterrorism operation.

Source: Los Angeles Times July 27, 2021 10:07 UTC