Originally Posted by
ORAC
I don’t - I just question how he got himself into this position in the first place….
You wrote "Then he [Biden], no one else, decided the timetable for the pull-out without consultation with allies." Wrong. Trump and Pompeo signed the timeline into the Doha Agreement, on behalf of the Coalition, without consultation. See below. Thanks to that signature, the Taliban have had an effective veto on the matter ever since given the US's clear intent to disengage. (NutLoose, this remains true however much you exclaim otherwise.)
The majority of the experts seem to disagree with you - perhaps you can provide a link to the text of the agreement supporting your assertion?
Doha Agreement 2020
I forgot, there was one other firm commitment, which was that the Taliban wouldn't allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for terror attacks. Read the text and weep: the condition relating to peace talks merely follows on from the Coalition ceasefire and withdrawal, and commits the Taliban to precisely no progress in peace talks, which is what happened. Whatever the 'experts' say, there's been no breach.
Regarding those 'experts', see
this piece in The Week about the ideological battle getting under way in Washington. It's striking how pro-intervention (hawkish) academics, diplomats and generals are writing polemics and appearing on TV in defence of their pet ideologies, their army budgets, and/or their past decisions. The many attacks on Biden and misrepresentations of the Doha Agreement are part of that. However there are plenty of dissenting expert voices (mainly restrainer/realist academics) out there:
@PatPorter76 for instance is doing hard yards on Twitter and has an
article supporting Biden's decisions in The Critic. On the skewing of viewpoints in the MSM, here's the international relations professor some might recognise from his 'child in background during BBC interview' moment (text pasted from the Twitter thread linked below):
The biggest surprise, revelation even, of Afghanistan’s fall is not that the Taliban are bad or that the departure is messy. We knew that already. It’s how belligerent, even militaristic, the American and British media are, how totally captured by blob talking points about the 'necessity’ that America fight all over the place and that it’s always ‘defeat’ rather than retrenchment or cutting your losses. Two weeks ago, there was almost no reporting on Afghanistan. Suddenly a few days of inevitability chaotic imagery, and America is abandoning its responsibilities in a fiasco.
And it was all hawks all the time on-air to comment. No retrenchers or restrainers to place the withdrawal in greater context. Even in academia, a lot of international relations scholars have deeply soured on the war for more than a decade. But no one ever called them to be on TV. The blob-ish, keep fighting indefinitely framing of this whole thing has been remarkable. No wonder Obama and Trump were afraid to withdraw.
So I'm treating expert views on this subject with extreme caution: the MSM is giving priority to largely the same people that got us here. I certainly don't recommend uncritically citing Telegraph or Times articles...