By TYLER GREGORY, Guest Columnist
The swift removal of troops from Afghanistan by the Biden-Harris Administration is quite possibly one of the largest foreign policy debacles since the Vietnam War.
I, like many others, disapprove of extensive government spending and was looking forward to the cost reduction that would be caused by removing troops from Afghanistan.
However, I believe that this removal could have been performed in a better manner.
The crisis, created by the seemingly immediate removal of all United States military personnel, emboldened the Taliban to take over the regions previously held by the United States and the Afghan National Army.
This removal also left American citizens and many of the United States’ Afghan allies and interpreters to be subject to Taliban rule.
The exit from Afghanistan led to the loss of 13 U.S. service members’ lives in a suicide bombing of the Kabul Airport, among other civilians.
The Department of Defense has since stated that they argued in favor of leaving a smaller “skeleton” force behind within Afghanistan to aid in cost-cutting as well as keeping more Americans safe.
This force would consist of 3,000 to 4,500 members, and the primary focus would be to keep air support systems intact to aid the Afghan National Army.
These advisements were ignored in the name of living up to an ill-advised promise that President Joe Biden made in April to “remove all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 11.”
This promise was made as a symbolic political ploy to please his voting base, and it did not take into consideration the actual logistics of the removal or the threat to the lives involved.
Overall, the United States government, throughout its history, has heeded warnings from George Washington, our first president, to avoid foreign entanglements.
However, this has changed with the wars of the 20th century and so on.
We have now become what President Kennedy called the “watchmen of the walls of world freedom.” And as much as any Republican or Democrat may not like that, it is simply the case.
We have now made our metaphorical bed and must sleep in it unless we want other expanding superpowers to take over our role as the world’s watchmen.
Gregory is the vice-chairman of the NWOSU College Republicans.