Blinken on July 7: “We are staying, the embassy is staying, our programs are staying. If there is a significant deterioration in security...I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday.”
> "If there is a significant deterioration in security -- that could well happen, we've discussed this before -- I don’t think it’s going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday."
So the administration mispredicted something that was presumably obvious. You'd think the blog post about having serious discussions could actually explain that and attempt to have a serious discussion around it instead of mischaracterizing the interview and ignoring the content.
Misprediction? They are simultaneously surveilling everyone in the world and are getting nothing out of it. Confident statements from the administration are no longer worth a dime.
If they're not worth a dime then don't mention them at all. If they're worth something then they need to be discussed "seriously", as the blog post itself preaches. Not mischaracterized, and not used to mislead readers about their contents. All the arguing you're doing needs to be in the blog post, not here.
There was no right way. Anyone who thinks a different outcome was possible should watch the Vice documentary “This is What Winning Looks Like”. The Taliban was going to take over no matter what we did. If we couldn’t create a stable government in 20 years and hundreds of billions of dollars then it simply wasn’t possible. It was probably never possible. The only alternative was to do what Obama and Trump did which is to kick the can further down the road at the cost of more American lives and dollars. The Biden admin absolutely did the right thing and the best that can be done now is to accept refugees.
It's the side-effect of politicians being chosen for legitimacy (identity), not competency.
> The reason for this sudden silence is that in the year 2021, the cream of American society and the flower of its finest universities, can only understand the world as projections of the country’s own domestic neuroses. Our current elites, whether in media or politics, squint at the strange peoples and languages of whatever international conflict and only see who or what they can map to their internal gallery of heroes and villains: Who’s the PoC? Who’s the Nazi?
> Q Mr. President, some Vietnamese veterans see echoes of their experience in this withdrawal in Afghanistan. Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, with some people feeling —
> THE PRESIDENT: None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is — you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy — six, if I’m not mistaken.
> The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.
> There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.
https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1427314149319643139