We should have preserved the status quo by leaving several thousand troops in the country. Another version of this is that we didn’t need to stick with the Trump administration’s ludicrous deal with the Taliban. The administration says if we suspended our departure, the Taliban would have gone on the offensive, provoking another cycle of surges. It argues that Afghanistan is fundamentally different from South Korea and Germany, where U.S. troops are not stationed in the middle of a civil war. But given what we know now about the Afghan military and government, it is more difficult to justify risking U.S. troops to definitively answer this question.

Source: Washington Post August 18, 2021 11:37 UTC