Originally Posted by Lowslung

You are so close to hitting the nail on the head. If we didn’t have the will to defeat the Taliban over nearly two decades in Afghanistan, what makes you think the American people will stomach the effort it will take to unseat a regime that is far more sophisticated, better funded, and determined? You may wish the reality were different, but it’s not. An extended campaign, likely involving tens of thousands of ground troops, significant casualties, hundreds of billions of dollars, and real sacrifice from the American public, is a pipe dream and you know it (or at least you should). There’s a reason previous leaders didn’t want to be sucked into such a conflict & it wasn’t because they were all a bunch faint hearted sissy boys. This whole stupid crisis is a realtime lesson in why international policy is not something you just want to walk into unprepared & wing it. Nevertheless, that’s just what we’ve done & we’re now stuck with nothing but bad outcomes. The most likely one is that we make a deal that will be touted as marginally better than the JCPOA, but won’t be. The only question is do we get to that point in a couple weeks, a couple years, or a couple decades?