There are no countries supported by our military that would collapse if our military was withdrawn.  A country that depends on our military support to exist would be considered “occupied.”  Occupation was the state of some nations following World War II, but it was the urgent goal of the Allies to put those countries back on their feet.  “Occupation” was always viewed as a temporary status.

Afghanistan has been an occupied nation for twenty years. We now know how dependent it was on our occupation, since it collapsed as soon as we declared our intention to leave.  There was no “Afghanistan” apart from the funding and military presence of the United States. That should not be the permanent status of any sovereign nation.

Virtually no one among the political pundits favored the “nation-building” that was required for us to keep a military presence in Afghanistan or Iraq, but keeping a country on “life-support” with our military presence was considered necessary and without time limits, if you listen to the armchair critics now.

Probably the worst mistake of the Biden administration was over-estimating how much the sitting government would be able to assist in the withdrawal of American citizens.  President Ashraf Ghani fled before the Taliban even reached the gates of Kabul, leaving a total power vacuum for the Taliban to walk into, and leaving U.S. citizens to fend for themselves in their exit of a country they propped up for twenty years.

No one seems surprised that the Republic of Afghanistan vanished overnight, and that U.S. citizens and their military had to manage their own evacuation. Everyone seems to think propping up such as government with a minimal occupying force was a good investment of American lives and foreign aid. So many legislators and journalists in the past have spoken loudly against “nation building” in the Mideast, but apparently there is more appetite for keeping nations on “life support.”

This is not to say that the Biden administration should not have anticipated how fragile the existing Afghanistan was and how inept they would be in assisting the evacuation. Clearly the preparations for evacuation should have rested entirely on American shoulders, and they should have begun in earnest months ago.  And yet I wonder how many outside the Biden administration imagined how quickly and completely the Afghan administration would vanish once it was clear the paychecks from America would be cut off.  Now you see them, now you don’t.

There were never any good choices in cutting off a nation on life support.