There are no good answers now.
The good answer was in 2002, when the Taliban were pushed into a corner. The good answer was to accept NATO’s invocation of Article V, make this a multinational effort with the singular objective of overthrowing the Taliban, and then allow a drawn-down multinational force to supervise humanitarian reconstruction. But no, we had to go it alone and then take our eye off the ball before the job was done so that Bush the Dumber could work out his daddy issues in Iraq, with predictable results.
For the last ten years or more, there have been two choices: stay forever and slowly bleed out, or give up and come home and accept the consequences. There is no national will to stay, so the only thing to do is come home – which was not a controversial notion at all until two weeks ago when people realized What That Meant. Now the Republicans are desperately hoping everyone will forget all the tweets and posts and press released about how Tr*mp actually ended the war in Afghanistan so that they can paint this as Biden’s Saigon (timely reference, well done, why not compare Hillary to Maude again).
The fact is, Biden wants out. He wanted out in 2009-2010, and had to sit by as the Pentagon mau-maued Obama into going along with another “surge” in order to [FILE NOT FOUND]. Given the opportunity, he has refused to go along with it again, and the Pentagon has a lot to answer for – mostly “how come this army you trained and equipped for eighteen years fell over like a Big 12 football defense at the first sign of combat?”
It’s going to be ugly, and my heart breaks for everyone stuck there, and we’re probably ten years away from another mob of expat Saudis launching terror attacks around the world from their safe haven (and it’s past time to hold Saudi Arabia to account for the last twenty years, but good luck with that), but at some point, you just have to accept that band-aids don’t fix bullet holes and we don’t have the will as a country to do anything else, and that the time to save Afghanistan was three administrations ago. Let’s just try to make a little bit of an effort for once to put the blame where it belongs this time.