Hard to swallow this, given that trump neither knew or bothered to find out what his job was, and made no attempt to do it in any case. I doubt very much that 9/11 optics had much weight in the actions taken. The trump deal with the Taliban put a cease fire between them and OUR forces in place, contingent on the condition that we withdrew all troops by May 1. trump then withdrew 84% of our forces despite the accelerating pace of Taliban violations of the agreement both in cooperating with al Qaeda and in conducting attacks on government forces and leadership figures.

Biden could, of course, have canceled the agreement, surged troops back into the country, and resumed direct U.S. combat operations, the only action that could have forestalled the Taliban takeover...for a while. He chose not to. Had he done so, or even delayed more in our withdrawal, our casualties would have mounted in the most lost of causes.

The lightening collapse of the Kabul government showed one truth about the Afghan people; they are sick to death of fighting...40 years is just too long and they will accept any "solution" that brings the fighting to an end.