An honest question: Has a single pundit anywhere over this last week outlined a concrete and realistic plan for a better path forward in Afghanistan? For all the hand-wringing and pearl-clutching, I haven't seen anyone knowledgable offer a better solution.
Almost everything I've seen—in print and TV—are the same people who previously failed in their own efforts to solve Afghanistan over the last 20 years expressing disgust that Biden didn't miraculously solve all the intractable problems that they themselves kicked down the road.
I really find nothing more tiresome and hack-ish in politics than former officials tsk-tsk-ing on how to do something better, when in reality they—when it was their turn—didn't and couldn't do it better.
The only serious alternative anyone seems to offer on Afghanistan is that we should have kept going forever in a two-decade war that continues to kill 5,000 - 10,000 civilians a year while offering no meaningful progress toward a stronger democracy or civil institutions.
(And that, of course, was the status quo *before* Trump made a deal with the Taliban to leave and forced the Afghan govt to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners and allow them to return to the fight last year—which made things worse and harder.)
One example: I have yet to see someone who can explain how we could have evacuated 100,000 of the most capable and involved Afghans—the leaders of civil society—out of the country, quietly, without loudly undermining the Afghan government and causing it to collapse even faster.
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