America’s exit from Afghanistan was going to come eventually. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump both declared their intentions to extricate the U.S. from its “forever war.” The American public by and large ratified this position.
In the end, though, both former presidents balked when confronted by pushback from the Pentagon. Then, in April 2021, President Joe Biden declared that he was the fourth president to preside over the war in Afghanistan, and refused to “pass this responsibility on to a fifth.”
Unfortunately for Biden, his execution of the withdrawal, which wrapped up at the end of August 2021, was shambolic. Scenes of Kabul International Airport being mobbed by thousands of Afghans desperately fleeing the Taliban only added to the misery.
