The film by @RodLurie of “The Outpost” by @jaketapper (on Netflix) is very good, but one aspect of the book it couldn’t capture was how many troops rotated in and out of that base over the years. Hundreds, perhaps. All of them to defend an outpost that had no earthly use. A Tweet Peter Sagal @petersagal

“I’m now the fourth United States president to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan, two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.” President Joesph Biden.

President Biden has announced that we are pulling our troops out of Afghanistan. I’m happy with that but not as thrilled as I thought I would be and I’m not sure why. I have, after all, been ranting and whining for years about our being in Afghanistan. (A couple of examples are here, here, and here.) We currently have about 2,500 troops – although there are reports that there are an additional 1,000 Special Forces hidden away – in Afghanistan and our NATO allies have another 7,000 or so. At the height of our presence, under President Obama, we had about 100,000 troops in-country and, over the almost twenty years we have been there, over 750,000 different troops have served in Afghanistan with the main result being the drastic increase in housing cost in Kabul.

Interestingly enough, only the New York Times and the Washington Post seem to feature the withdrawal, the LA Times mentioned it below the main headline of an old murder case that has been solved – well, maybe not solved, but people arrested and charged for the murder, anyway – and FOX didn’t seem to mention it as a news item at all (still, they did have a commentator reference it, saying it was a mistake). Another guy who thinks it is a mistake is Conservative Bret Stephens, who, in an editorial in the New York Times, gave the biggest reason why we should stay. After writing about an Afghan girl’s soccer team, he writes, Those women are now being abandoned. So is every Afghan who struggled to make the country a more humane, hospitable, ethnically, and socially tolerant place ...

He is right, we will be abandoning a lot of people, probably, mostly, women and I would be in favor of staying if there was any chance of being successful. But, come September of this year, we will have been in Afghanistan for twenty years and are no closer to winning – whatever that is – than we were ten years ago or fifteen years ago. The mistake, in my opinion, is not in our leaving, but in the whole misguided adventure. I want to be clear that this has not always been my position, when Candidate Obama said that Afghanistan, not Iraq, was the good war, I agreed and it was one of the reasons I worked on his campaign. But, by the end of 2011, I realized I was wrong, writing When Obama first started talking about Afghanistan being the good war, I thought it sounded like such a good idea. I was wrong – which means nothing – and Obama was wrong, which means a lot. We should get out. Say it was a mistake, say we got Osama and we won, say whatever; just get out. This will not end well and it is time to cut our losses.

We should have treated the Al-Qaeda attack like the criminal act that it was. The Taliban didn’t attack us, Afghanistan didn’t attack us, an antiAmerican-in Muslim-countries terrorist group,  al-Qaeda, attacked us because we have stationed troops in Saudi Arabia. Osama bid Ladan, the founder and main motivation behind Al-Qaeda, was a Saudi, a rich Saudi, the heir to Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire. Of the 19 terrorists directly involved in 911, 15 were from Saudi Arabia (one was from Egypt and two were from the United Arab Emirates). Attacking a tribal, male-dominated, Islamic fundamentalist country like Afghanistan and expecting to leave it as a Democracy ’s was and still is a fantasy.

If President Biden persists, we will be leaving Afghanistan this year and, and, while I’m not thrilled, I am relieved.