Absolutely guarantee the Soviets would have cleaned their clocks, like Putin did with the Chechens.
The only real reason the Afghans won was because we supplied them with MANPADS that could take down their aircraft. Without that the Soviets would have wrecked their asshole. But again, we built up the monster that we ended up fighting. The problem is that there is never any meaningful follow through. Did we do a decent job with an education system, root out corruption, support their military, do conscription or regulate it, listen to their needs and wants and try to craft a society that was good and decent? No. We threw money at corrupt officials, who have been seen fleeing with cars so full of money they have to leave them on the helipad. We've got a demoralized and ineffectual army taking the brunt of the casualties and shit for 20 years. We ignored their culture, forcing Western ideology on them which they clearly did not want and shed the literal second we were gone.
So why didn't we do any of this? Well, neo-liberals are basically boomers who firmly believe in the 'McDonald' style of Empire, stamping down our ideology and removing the 'primitive' ideology that follows. The problem is that you need boots on the ground and locals to do it. And the locals who will sell out their traditions for you are basically scum of the Earth and get along with globohomos because they're the same. The problem is these traitorous locals only seek to drain you of money and provide little in the way of...well, anything. The generals and glow niggers are there just to cash a check, its not like they live there.
We never properly nation-built, because 1) Modern America is extremely isolationist across the spectrum in its citizenry. Liberal progressives will mindlessly clap for distributing gender queer education dollars in Pakistan, but they're not for nation building. No one is. So the will and attention span among the citizenry was extremely low. 2) Neo-Liberals only want a subservient population that abandons their traditions for Western ones, which relies on traitors to the people and country, which inevitably attracts the worst sort of scum. These people only last with American might behind them and promptly fold once it is withdrawn. See...every nation building exercise since fucking Korea.
The big problem the globohomos and neo-lib faggots have right now is that 1, modern America is isolationist again. We don't WANT to be world police. We don't WANT endless wars. Nobody does. And not only that, we don't want to be embarrassed by them. And this is a huge fucking embarrassment. Because literally no one except people receiving a check could say WHY we were in Afghanistan. The Afghan war was a year or two, tops. When we punished the government and never found Bin Laden, we should have fucked off. We didn't. We stuck around because neo-liberals and neo-cons wanted to make it the Disney Land of the Middle East with the most corrupt fuckers around. Its been a 20 year globo homo circle jerk.
So, even though foreign policy is not on the minds of many Americans, this presents a few major problems:
1) The Biden Admin was perceived weak before. This is now an unmitigated disaster for their reputation. They already looked weak as shit, but with this Afghan pullout, it just made the situation that much worse. They tried to use September 11th and score a win with political points and fucked it up so completely and so terribly that it can't be salvaged. They didn't use any of that extra time to plan and prepare. They used the withdrawal as a political tool and worse, completely failed. They didn't renegotiate with the Taliban, they didn't properly dispose of vehicles, they didn't evac personnel. They seemed to do nothing and were shocked when the Taliban just road through the country. Like, you know, everyone said they would.
2) You can't blame Trump because the date he put was May and its August. So you took a later date. You could have also just went, "I'm president now, we'll see" and done a different draw down or renegotiate. They didn't. There is very little maneuvering room here. The fact that he gave his photo op and blamed literally everyone but himself and then fucked off like a cuck worsens the situation incredibly.
3) The visual metaphors on the withdrawal are fucking damming. They're inescapable. People are already putting this side by side to Saigon, the Afghan people hanging off planes. It can be used as a metaphor for the entire administration.
4) The way the withdrawal was handled has embarrassed extremely powerful people, who will now be putting the blame on the demented president who wanted to try and use the withdrawal as some fucktarded political win. '
All in all, the withdrawal is a fucking disaster and only the most die-hard and idiotic of shills can defend this. You're brain dead retarded to think this was handled in a decent manner. The Taliban would have taken over anyway, but we could have denied them equipment, evacuated everyone who wanted to get out and made sure things were done orderly. They were not. Everyone wanted us out of Afghanistan.
This has shattered the illusion of a 'competent president' and a 'return to normalcy' or that the adults, or fucking anyone is in charge. American attention span is short, but that imagery is history making. So its going to be burned in people's minds for a long time.