With @CChivvis and @Rob_Malley: youtu.be/Lbh_sKoqhsU?si=QwDS…

I will read the book, but it is extraordinary to say that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was as spectacular an own goal as the current war with Iran. As Phil Gordon points out in the review, there was no stable equilibrium to preserve in Afghanistan — only a war that the U.S. side was losing, and with greater effort could have at best lost more slowly, causing only more death and waste: “Bergen is highly critical of [the withdrawal] decision and argues that even a force of only 2,500 U.S. troops, along with twice as many Europeans, contractors, and the Afghan National Security Forces, would have been enough to ‘hold off the Taliban.’ But this critique overlooks the fact that the Taliban had been refraining from attacks on U.S. forces only because Trump had committed in 2020 to pull them all out. If Biden had abandoned that commitment and stayed in Afghanistan, the Taliban would certainly have resumed their military offensive, and the Afghan army might have collapsed anyway in the long run. That would have meant extending the U.S. war in Afghanistan into its third decade and draining scarce resources even as the United States dealt with other major conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. And then Biden’s successor would have been faced with the familiar choice between ordering a further surge of forces or risking military defeat.”