I know you like to pin everything on Biden, I get that, but I've read several articles now about the rapid collapse of the Afghan military which points to yet another failure of US intelligence. That kind of failure didn't start last election, it's been brewing for a while, maybe even 20 years. On the face of it, I don't think it's possible to accuse the US of knowing Afghanistan very well, and that ignorance didn't start in the last few months. If Biden did some things wrong, well, he'll have to join the queue.
I don't catch Maddow often, but I liked this recent rant, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1xWpFLWa0M. So yes, the US poured a lot of money into Afghanistan, but did the cash actually end up in the coffers of Bechtel and Halliburton and the other contractors and armament suppliers, and what purpose did THAT serve?
I find the current handwringing about Afghanistan a bit beside the point. I see it mostly as fodder for making political hay. I suspect that the number of people worldwide who give a damn about Afghans or their country rounds to zero, to first order approximation. That may be a bit cynical, and I'd accept that accusation, but this is just so much déjà vu.
Good piece by Gwynne Dyer about it all, https://gwynnedyer.com/2021/afghanistan-how-did-they-think-it-would-end/.
I also see some stories appearing about how terrible the Taliban are. Believable enough, I suppose, but are they any worse than some of the despotic regimes the US has been allied with over the last 5-6 decades. This kind of moral angle doesn't sway me much. To be doubly cynical, am I supposed to believe that a bunch of politicians in Washington suddenly care about Afghan women? A day late and dollar short.
The failure of the Afghan military in this situation is solely due to Biden. We trained them to only be effective with air support, like our military and like with the South Vietnam military. This is of course not Biden's doing, but it was Biden who took away all USA air support this year and would not allow US contractors to help maintain the Afghan's airplanes. Military airplanes require a lot of maintenance (my best friend was an aircraft mechanic in the Navy), so it was only a matter of time until the Afghans no longer had air support. At that point, they were nullified.
But here's the thing, we all knew this would happen because the same thing happened in South Vietnam. Both SV and Afghanistan were trained to be rich country militaries, only they were not rich and could support themselves. Biden is not a novice; he was in the Senate when Saigon fell. Likewise, his administration are leftover Obama people. He, and they, should have known better. They made the same mistakes.
Having a president that make the same mistake over and over again, puts us at a strategic loss since adversaries will be able to predict how they should engage to maximize the greatest damage to us and minimize damage to them.
I get the last point you made, and I am sure many, right now, dont really give a damn about Afghans. But the main point here is to keep terrorist organizations from having a safe haven to plan attacks against the West, and how this operation should have been framed from the beginning. Of Course GWB is at fault for reframing our presence as nation building, but that does not take away from the main point we were there to stop terrorist cells from forming and to also have a base of operations in the region. When they reform, and they will, and plan attacks against the West, people will start to care. You can write it off like Obama did with ISIS (the "JV Team" as he put it), but anyone looking at this knows where it is going.
On top of that, Pakistan is now allying itself with the Taliban, which will great effect how Pakistan works with the west. Iran, to the west, is obviously not going to give us any favors. China, to the North, is already planing to take advantage of rare earth mining, and will not be interested in giving us any base of operations. Anyone know if Turkmenistan is on friendly terms with the West? Point being, we will not have any nearby bases to utilize when Al Qaeda and ISIS reform.