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LETTER: Biden botched the Afghanistan withdrawal

3 min read

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It saddens me to have to agree with most of the points made in the Observer-Reporter‘s Thursday editorial, “Afghanistan Exit Plan Botched,” and “botched” is the operative word. To challenge the essay or to disregard its importance would be disingenuous. 

All presidents make mistakes and inflict debacles on their countries. The Trump administration was a practically non-stop affront to civilized human beings. Trump, along with Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, mismanaged Afghanistan, investing and perpetuating the investment of a vast amount of blood and treasure, which we now find to have been all for naught.
 
The primary responsibility for the Afghan mess, though, will lay at the feet of President Biden as he is the one who ended it, and he ended it tragically. What humanitarian can wipe from their memory the vision of desperate Afghans running to an American cargo plane, some jumping on to the plane and clinging to it as it took off, some falling to their deaths or being crushed to death in the plane’s wheel wells? It causes me to feel grief and anger, particularly given that the removal of our troops in this way was engineered by a president with vast foreign policy experience.
 
Additionally, we have no assurance that all of our citizens or the Afghans who helped us will be able to safely get to the airport in Kabul and be taken out of the country. The pledges of the ruthless savages of the Taliban to run Afghanistan in peace and reconciliation and with regard for the rights of women should be seen with the same seriousness as a pledge from Adolf Hitler had he ever stated that he welcomed Jews to live in Germany and to invite them to serve in his Cabinet. 
 
Our Afghanistan retreat will certainly be placed on the Biden record as a permanent black mark. 
Will it define and ruin the Biden presidency? I doubt it, though it will certainly provide great campaign spots for Republicans in the 2022 and 2024 elections. 
 
It is a sad day for America, our prestige and power, and for the people of Afghanistan, who have every reason to fear that they will now be living in a constant state of fear and terror.
 
Oren Spiegler
 
Peters
 
 

 
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