While my heart breaks for the people of Afghanistan, I want to point out that none of this should be any surprise.  The nation building experiment has been a dismal failure since the very beginning and government officials have been lying the whole time. Back in Dec 2019 the Washington Post released The Afghanistan Papers and it surprisingly got little press & if you haven’t read it, you should take a look.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

Please read the reporting, it’ll shine a light at the lies & failures from political leadership in the US, failures that were bipartisan.  The US spent $300 million a day for 20 years, if that wasn’t enough then no amount of money & blood spent would make a difference.  While I’m a non interventionist, I do think the US had the right to go into Afghanistan to go after Al Qaeda & Osama Bin Laden but to shift their plans to try and build a Western democracy in a place like that was simply folly and too many people died needlessly because American politicians wanted to look good.