My thoughts are so conflicted on this.
We needed to leave, but the optics for this look absolute dogshit and are a definitive black eye for the US Government and Military.
Only way US could've won is to have stayed for fifty years and Americanized the shit out of a generation of Afghanis and their children to where a centralized government seemed ok, and taliban stranglehold felt bad.
I've been hearing our plan of leaving behind a Afghani military capable of standing on its own was going to fail since the moment I joined in 2011, but nobody I knew thought it was fail so spectacularly. Most people thought that they would run into trouble logistically and be unable to keep up with an taliban war machine that had been in operation since before 9/11, but nobody thought that the afghani forces with superior numbers and equipment.........would just bail on their own defense.
I'd always heard that the only two Afghani military fields that were trustworthy were their pilots (which are incapable of being used without support but that is any group of pilots in any military) and their SOF guys, who did the most fighting and dying for Afghanistan when the Taliban push started.
It was a huge goat f**k that should shame the USA into getting into that kind of conflict again for a long time............but it won't. If your objective was Osama, should've done it the long route with cia tracking and delta force killing him on a mountain top somewhere.
I know some of the guys who I served with are really feeling the sting of this one. Nobody likes to dedicate years of their lives, and lose friends to an absolute failure of a mission.
Also, because the US goverment just abandoned millions upon millions of dollars of gear in afghanistan, they should not ever make a joe pay for lost gloves and boonie caps again. f**king bullshit.