AFGHANISTAN LOST: thinking about my first trip to the region, Afghanistan 2006, when I took these pictures. Those are Afghan Army troops at a training center outside Kabul, along with on the ground photos. I was in Hellman province, Kandahar, Lashkah Gar and other hotspots. It’s like no other place on earth.
No, the US should not have engaged in “nation building“, but it took long to learn that lesson. However, the way the exit from Afghanistan is being handled now is abysmal. How anyone, whether Trump or Biden, thinks the Taliban will ever be at all reasonable… rather than brutal evil thugs… is beyond me. Too many of the people I met over there told me about life under the Taliban before. The deadly killings and purges. Now it’s going to be back. And there will be no force for good on site to make sure that terrorism doesn’t rise up against our country again in that same place.
Kabul will likely fall very soon, and even as we speak our military is evacuating thousands. We’ve seen this before, in Saigon in the 1970s very sad and avoidable. Afghanistan will now go back to a new level of dangerous moving forward.
Photo Credit: Mark Larson