Originally Posted by
NutLoose
On another note I was reading that if the USA decided to withdraw which in effect kicked the legs out from every from under every other country involved, why did they not do it during the Winter months when the Taliban do not fight, thus giving the Country a chance.
That would have required thinking about it before making a decision to leave, which does not appear to be a strong suit in the current leadership's hand. I agree with you on a key point: once the US left, a lot of the lesser included cases were left without out large muscle movement support.
Oh to be a fly on the wall for the last two months as the various disengagement meetings and plans were put together.
I am a bit out of date, granted, but what is opaque to me is how the in-country phased disengagement was being planned and coordinated with the (so-called) friendlies, whose abilities to adhere to OPSEC are (or were in my experience) infamously bad.
I suspect a few papers on that will emerge in the coming months; I'll be reading them with interest. Theater level planning at the pol/mil level is something I had a modest amount of experience with, but as I look back it's been well over a decade since I did anything like that.
Sam, take it to Jet Blast, will you? (And time lord). This is the Mil Av forum, and while what the Mil does is heavily informed by what the Pols do, bickering about that is (1) long in the tooth and (2) best discussed in JB. The topic at the head of thisthread is
Afghanistan 2021 Onwards
not bickering about a twenty year old decision.