NY Times: US Withdrawal from Afghanistan: What if Joe Biden is Right?

This phrase encompasses everything that was wrong with our mission as Americans: the idea that the Afghans themselves don’t know how to fight and that just a little training like defeating the rebels will help them.

That? Thinking that Afghans need to be trained to fight is the same as believing that Pacific Islanders need fishing lessons.

Afghan men know how to fight. They fought with each other for a long time, with the British, the Soviets or the Americans.

The point was never to prepare our allies in Afghanistan to fight. The goal has always been to persuade them to fight for those corrupt pro-American Western governments that we have helped establish in Kabul.

And the smaller Taliban forces, which no superpower had trained, had a stronger will and advantage from the start because they were seen fighting for the principles of Afghan nationalism: independence from foreigners and the preservation of fundamentalist Islam, which is the base of the country. religion, culture, law and politics.