Comments by "Gaza is not Amalek" (@Ass_of_Amalek) on "This Is What Winning Looks Like (Full Length)" video.

@chadthundercock4806 america lost because the morale of the american public was defeated. they also handled the withdrawal very badly due to their fickle partisan politics getting in the way of strategy - afghanistan would have in retrospect had far better chances if NATO troops left earlier, because around 2010-2013, the taliban were almost defeated, and the islamic republic would have looked like it had a chance even without foreign troops. what actually happened was that the US chose a point at which the taliban were winning the war even against NATO troops to pull out, and they even sold out the afghan government by allowing the taliban to exclude them from the negotiations for no reason other than to express that the government had no legitimacy. the US also made literally no demands in the surrender deal for how the taliban should behave towards other afghans - no limit on armed aggression and territorial ambitions, no expectation to respect human rights or islamic republic laws, no amnesty or free passage for NATO collaborators or political opposition. it was a deal to hand over afghanistan to the taliban, and a withdrawal ~10 years earlier would not have been that.
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when did they last only a week? it took the taliban several months to conquer afghanistan after the last NATO combat missions.
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@chadthundercock4806 the time-limiting factor wasn't the relative fighting strength so much as it was how clearly the way the US "negotiated" their surrender put the writing on the wall that the taliban were about to control all of afghanistan no matter what. absolutely everybody knew that it was a losing fight. soldiers don't want to die for a cause that's already lost, and the most rational thing to do was whatever raised their chances of either living on good terms with the taliban under taliban rule (so certainly the first order of business would be to stop trying to kill taliban), or getting themselves and their families out of afghanistan (which was not an option available to regular afghan soldiers or police, it was hardly even available to interpreters who had been promised this the whole time before they even signed the contract).
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