The national security establishment has never cared about Afghanistan
The mission there consistently played second fiddle to beefs with Iran, Russia, China, and Iraq
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After a rough couple of days, the evacuation of personnel from the Kabul Airport seems to be going a bit more smoothly, and the media’s obsession with trying to punish Joe Biden for defying the national security establishment and ending a hopeless and pointless war should fade away.
The damage to his approval rating will be already done, however, and a message will be sent to future politicians: it doesn’t matter how badly we fail; any effort to admit that we failed and cut out losses will be blamed on you, not us. What I find particularly frustrating about the national security establishment’s hostility to leaving Afghanistan — a policy they opposed during the most opportune moment to do it when Osama bin Laden was killed during Barack Obama’s presidency, a policy they successfully blocked during Trump’s four years, and a policy they’ve been furiously lashing out at Biden for implementing — is that they themselves have never treated Afghanistan as strategically important to the Unite…