The only President to get the war in Afghanistan right was. . .

 

Barack Obama.

Yes, I meant that.

Already I can hear screaming from some that this is absurd.  Obama was a Marxist Socialist Agent of Destruction who never got anything right. . . 

Well, gentle readers, I'm not a fan of President Obama's.  Basically, I think he stood for very little and like Woodrow Wilson confused talking with action.  But he got Afghanistan right.

Here's why.

President Bush blew it with Afghanistan. The US had to go into the country after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, but the US should have treated that as a criminal act, not military one, which Obama would have done, had he been in office in 2001.  Going into Afghanistan was necessary, but a short, sharp, destructive punitive expedition would have sufficed.

Yes, the last punitive expedition the country went into didn't catch the bad guy, Pancho Villa, but then neither did the long slow invasion of Afghanistan. That took years, and indeed it occurred under President Obama's watch.  The Punitive Expedition into Mexico did serve, FWIW, to keep big forays across the border (well, at least armed ones, big forays across the border are going on right now, but not armed ones), from occurring again.

We could have done that.  We pretty much could have destroyed much of the Taliban, maybe killed Bin Laden, and wrecked Afghanistan as a potential threat for some time without occupying it.

But once you do that, you are in it.  You break it, and we did, you bought it.

President Obama seems to have gotten that. He intended to get out, but didn't. He even launched a "surge" which regained lost ground.

President Trump didn't get it, or didn't care.  Probably the latter.  No matter how you look at it, however, the Doha Agreement was inexcusable.

Also inexcusable was committing to a May pull out, which under the circumstances was abandoning the country to the Taliban.  Further inexcusable was the effort to abandon the country prior to President Biden's inauguration.  It's still unclear what that was even about.

At least Trump listened to his military advisers to the extent he didn't pull out in January of this year.

Then came in Biden and made a hasty, botched, departure.   The administration has given the thin excuse that they expected the country to fall, but not so fast.

So, we have three Presidents who messed it up, and only one who got it right.  We rarely give President Obama credit for much here, but we'll give him credit for that.