Take your head out of your ass. Your scumbag President told the military how many troops they could have- evidently the assholes just said “yes sir” and never pushed, or understood, or cared how many troops would be needed for a safe planned withdrawal.
“Another decision that is almost certain to draw scrutiny from lawmakers is the Pentagon’s decision to close Bagram air base more than six weeks ago, when the mission to evacuate America’s closest allies had barely begun. The sprawling airfield, with two runways, is about 35 miles north of Kabul and would have offered an alternative to the single-runway airport there.”
“No one in their right mind would have closed Bagram Air Base while leaving behind thousands of civilians. But that’s what Joe Biden did,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) wrote on Twitter.
“Cotton’s criticism was echoed by most military experts with experience in the region. Barno, who commanded all U.S. forces in Afghanistan during the early years of the war, said that in his experience, “Kabul international airport is virtually indefensible.”
“Laurel Miller, who worked as a special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said the U.S. approach to the final days of the war also seemed to defy planning from several years earlier that concluded that any large-scale evacuation without Bagram or Kandahar air bases was going to be nearly impossible.”
“We expected it would be problematic to rely on the airport in an evacuation scenario because having to evacuate would mean the situation had deteriorated gravely already and many Afghans and other countries’ citizens would be desperate to get out,” Miller said.
Another former senior U.S. military commander, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, said that keeping Bagram open would have been a “safer bet.”
“It would have given us many tactical options right to the end, not the least being its defensibility,” the retired general said. “As the humanitarian situation deteriorated and then collapsed, operating out of Bagram could also have provided a better platform for supporting humanitarian processing at Kabul, or even at Bagram itself.”
Asked about the decision to close Bagram, Milley said that the “task given to us” after the military withdrawal was to protect the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, and that keeping Bagram and a military base at the Kabul airport would have required a “significant number of military forces that would have exceeded what we had.”
Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/08/18/afghanistan-pentagon-fall-of-kabul/