And this is where they screwed up, 3-6 months *from what point*. Consider the timeline of events. In Afghanistan Taliban offensives tend to start in spring due to several factors, it is known since years.It really, really pains me to agree with anything Biden says--and God knows he's earned the flake he's getting now, but there was never going to be a clean pullout given the situation. That's not to say that the Biden Admin is without fault, but the cities falling less than two weeks after our forces pull back is...is astonishingly bad. And proves how bad the Afghan government really was.
From what I saw, the Biden team had several things that kept them from being as effective as possible.
- They did NOT make contingency plans if things went tits up. I think Biden and his team expected the Afghan army to hold for 3-6 months.
- I think there was a political motivation to want to believe that the cities would hold out longer, because the admin wanted to put some distance between themselves and the impending disaster. I think that's impart why they delayed trying to get out. And some retard on the team suggested a 9/11 style celebration, as if this could be spun into such a thing.
Afghanistan fighting season - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
The Taliban had the usual window of mid April-October to get this year's activities decided, nothing more than mop up operations could be done later.
They finished the government in mid August, meaning they needed 4 months of fighting, ironically hitting nicely into the average of 3-6 months estimate, leaving the Taliban about 2 months of reserve for unexpected issues and mop up.
Trump's withdrawal planned to be done by May 1st, even if it dragged on into whole May, would hit 1.5 months at most. The Taliban would not be able to get so far so quickly, there's just no way. Afghan government may have folded a bit earlier in that scenario, but it wouldn't matter much, as Trump's plan gave the Taliban offensive hardly any time to escalate enough to interfere.
Meanwhile, the PR and diplomat led team handling this in the White House didn't give a damn about facts of the ground. They had to get this done, and decided the best way to do it yet stick it to Trump by not following his plan would be to turn it into a big 9/11 PR event, and expect the whole military situation in Afghanistan to adapt itself to the glorious professional administrative state bureaucracy's timeline.
Unfortunately for them, the Taliban never cared about all that and did things on their own timeline, according to own military circumstances.
The US administration woke up with its hand in the shitter in July, with everyone panicking about Taliban controlling a whole lot of countryside, prepping for taking over province capitals, which they did a month later, massive desertions in ANA, and polite suggestions by military people that plans need adjusting because the 9/11 date is most likely not realistic were after a week or two of pleading listened to on 8th July, causing Biden to shift the withdrawal to end of August. So they estimated at that point that the government should last further 2 months, but wouldn't be sure about 3. They were wrong, the government folded in barely over a month from that point. In hindsight the last moment to prevent things from going sideways was there - they should have already started the evacuation as an emergency on July 8 instead of just moving up the timeline. It would be even slower and more disorganized, but on the plus side without the chaos of Taliban takeover going on for the last 2 weeks, the extra 3 weeks would mean that with some luck they would miss Taliban taking Kabul by a week.