[St Charles Owl]

I think its a bit of both betrayal and politics gone bad. Even before 9/11 the Russians occupied this fragmented, tribal country to enormous cost in both money and lives of their own and got absolutely nowhere, why Western countries thought it would be any different is beyond me. Trying to create a working and surviving democracy in a country as "backward" as this one is futile, democracies very much survive on everyone having opportunity to thrive or at least have a decent living and this is a country that has so little going for it to be able to adequately sustain its population. It exports virtually nothing since the opium trade was curtailed and it imports one third of its GDP each year.

But I do think Biden is right to get out, its not worth the lives or the money to try to fix something that is likely to be unfixable. Afghanistan needs a leader to emerge, even a dictator would be preferable to the Taliban, someone the West can work with remotely and economically and hopefully pull the country into the 21st Century, but I can't see that happening with the way the Taliban operate such a strict religious ideology. The sort of occupations or police type enforcement by US troops is exactly what the US needs to stop doing, it creates enemies and fosters terrorism and generally achieves little in terms of advancement of the country.