The disaster in Afghanistan

The failures in Afghanistan fall to all four presidents to varying degrees:

George W. Bush for taking his eye off the mission with a detour to Iraq and the fallacy of nation-building; Obama for not ending our mission after killing Bin Laden; Trump for negotiating with the Taliban and setting a withdrawal date; and Biden for poor planning and communication as to our withdrawal.

I would also fault the many Americans and others who assumed the risk and have stayed to this point; they knew or should have know of the dangers well before now and left earlier on their own.

John W Thomas, Fort Collins

With all of the words written recently about Afghanistan, not one thing I have seen has identified the source of this vast screw up or the person responsible. The source? The original decision to send in ground troops. And the person responsible is, of course, George W. Bush. This decision simply turned the Afghans into a dependency of the U.S. which never developed any commitment to their own freedom — we saw this beautifully when element after element of their vast army simply surrendered rather than fight.

What should we have done? We should have identified one (or more) factions with the will to fight and offered them all the aid in the form of logistics and air support that they could use, but no ground troops.

As Americans, we are supposed to recognize that people need to be ready to fight for freedom, and the Afghans never were in that position as long as we were there to hold their hands and do all of the dirty work.

All we accomplished was to keep them from ever having to fight for themselves. Had we done this, that group might now be on top and we would have certainly have saved a bunch of American lives.

Tom Dahlquist, Boulder

Re: “Biden must widen net to get more allies out,” Aug. 26 editorial

Thank you for your courage to disagree with President Joe Biden and to advise him to reconsider his decision to leave the Kabul airport on August 31. As you point out, the reasons are many.

Surely if all state legislatures would pass a resolution for the U.S. military to stay as long as necessary, it would carry some weight.

There has to be somebody who can get this ball rolling.

Daniel Abraham, Centennial