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Originally Posted by PeteMoss
How do we have thousands to people there to pull out? Obviously not the greatest source, but wikipedia says we sent around 3000 soldiers. Did we really have that many translators?
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These rescue missions include families, that adds up quickly.
For example, Finland just released a statement that they will still try to rescue the locals who were employed by the Finnish embassy, which was pretty small. The list is still 180+ people.
(Finland like almost every western country abandoned their non-Finnish staff at the first stage of the rescue, and this statement only came after they were publicly shamed in our local media.)
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Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
I am not at all surprised that the locals were caught off guard - they didn't know the extent and suddenness of the exit that was to come. But Biden certainly did, and Trudeau presumably had some information about what the US was going to do. So failure to foresee this and ensure that it wasn't a cluster**** is absolutely something he should be criticized for harshly.
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I have a hard time criticizing Biden specifically for this. It's more like the Afghans made the whole western military decision making apparatus a global laughing stock.
Let's remember, the speed of the Taleban takeover did not catch only the US off guard, pretty much every western embassy was caught in the same mess. All of them have (or should have) their own analysts and foreign affairs experts and decision makers, who (theoretically) all make their own evaluations independently. For the smaller countries pulling their people out early would have been fairly easy, had they both predicted the development correctly and reacted to it in a timely fashion. I haven't read of any country that did that.
The exact same criticism that's been thrown at Biden and the US military intelligence is being thrown around everywhere. Germans, French and Brits are scrambling with their rescue operations just like the Americans.
Obviously a lot of people were also NOT caught by surprise, but at this point it's difficult to say who did the evaluation right and who just made a lucky guess that proved right in hindsight.
Personally I'm thinking that this was probably harder to predict the higher up the political hierarchy you are.