In it I said, "Before, rather than after, going to war the best and brightest of our military have 'thought a bit of the end of it.' They have a list of questions . . .. Among them are, 'What will be our exit strategy?' and 'After we leave will the people and their country be better off or worse off?'”
Knowing that about the military I could not believe that the departure President Biden pursued was something they had either urged upon him or even agreed to. But at that time I didn't have a source to cite to support my assumption.
I had even suggested in a prior (unpublished) version of that column (and included in the "Sources," under "Related") a rebuttal to the argument for leaving Afghanistan that "We shouldn't be keeping even 5000 or 10,000 troops in a foreign country." I wrote, "If true, then should we also bring the troops home from the other 150 (give or take) countries where we have even more troops -- Japan 54K, South Korea 26K, Germany 35K, Italy 12K, UK 9K?"
Today I came upon a couple of sources supporting (a) my assumption that the miliary did not support Biden's departure plans, and (b) that if we can justify 54,000 American troops still in Japan over 75 years after World War II what is so outrageous about keeping 5,000 or more troops in Afghanistan 20 years after our invasion?
Here are those sources:
The New York Times put six of its best reporters on its page one lead story today (Aug. 22) about the evolution of President Biden's approach to our troops departure from Afghanistan. After making reference to an April 2021 meeting in its opening sentence, the next sentence reads:
"It was two weeks after President Biden had announced the exit over the objection of his generals, but now they were carrying out his orders."
In other words, the generals did oppose Biden's departure plan -- while supporting the Constitution's requirement that they obey the commands of their civilian commander in chief. Michael D. Shear, et al, "Embassy in Kabul Warns Amricanws to Avoid Airport; Miscue After Miscue, Exit Plan Unravels," [Online headline: "Miscue After Miscue, U.S. Exit Plan Unravels; President Biden promised an orderly withdrawal. That pledge, compounded by missed signals and miscalculations, proved impossible.] New York Times, August 22, 2021, p. A1, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/us/politics/biden-taliban-afghanistan-kabul.html.
That story makes reference to an earlier New York Times report: Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger, "Debating Exit From Afghanistan, Biden Rejected Generals’ Views; Over two decades of war, the Pentagon had fended off the political instincts of elected leaders frustrated with the grind of Afghanistan. But President Biden refused to be persuaded." New York Times, April 18, 2021, p. A1, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/us/politics/biden-afghanistan-withdrawal.html ("The report by the Afghanistan Study Group, a bipartisan panel examining the peace deal reached in February 2020 under the Trump administration, found that withdrawing troops based on a strict timeline, rather than how well the Taliban adhered to the agreement to reduce violence and improve security, risked the stability of the country and a potential civil war once international forces left.")
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