THE UNEXPECTED, PREDICTABLE END OF THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
SOMETIMES WINNING LOOKS and feels like losing. This summer’s bloody, tumultuous withdrawal from Afghanistan was a predictable disaster. It was also an incredible, surprising anti-war victory.
My own thoroughly jaded worldview dictated that after two decades and $2 trillion, the only two realistic options were to stay in Afghanistan forever or depart in a blaze of chaos. As it happened, we got the latter. But I would have bet a great deal on the former.
The strategic and logistical failures of the botched withdrawal perfectly echoed the strategic and logistical failures of the occupation, and were made inevitable by those failures spanning four administrations.
Experts have made the case that there were several junctures where pulling out would have been less painful and less costly than it turned out
