Ralph Peter's Best to Worst COAs for Afghanistan

[Ken White]

Who's on first?

Development for most of Afghanistan with special emphasis on the carotene. It's good for you!

"We" have said, IIRC, that "...we erred in the 1980s and just left, we will not do that again, we will not leave you alone..." and dozens of other similar statements over the years as you point out. There is no legal requirement to stay but to me we inherited an ethical requirement to do so by our words. As I've said before, I do not think we should've said we we would stay and fix it (whatever that means) -- but we did say it. Repeatedly. Since we said we would, in public, we really need to do that. One cannot be made to say anything but anything one does say becomes a commitment.

That's probably why Creighton Abrams said "Generals should be noted for their silences."

We have abandoned others before and it hurt us -- our abandonment of Viet Nam (another place where we should not have said "we will..."), of the Kurds, earlier (ditto...) and of the Shia in southern Iraq after Desert Storm (ditto again) among others hurt us more internationally than did invading Iraq. The message was you cannot rely on the Americans. That needs to be fixed

The "we'll stay" comments came early on. Here's a recent one:

...And we could have replaced one power person with another. That would have been, I guess, the easy route, and then just left it behind, say we've done our duty and we've upheld the doctrine -- and said, okay, we're now going to take this group, replace them with this group -- and just got out of the way. But that's not -- that, one, didn't learn the lessons of the '80s and the '90s. And secondly, the interest is to build a flourishing democracy as an alternative to a hateful ideology. And it's not easy work. Afghanistan is a huge country. The road system is not nearly as well developed as a lot of other countries. You're just beginning to develop your resource base in a way that I hope benefits the people of Afghanistan -- after all, it's their resources.
...
told the President that you can count on the United States -- just like you've been able to count on this administration, you'll be able to count on the next administration, as well. It's in our interest that Afghanistan's democracy flourish. It's in America's interest that we forever deny safe haven to people who still want to kill our citizens.

LINK.

P.S.

Here's an early one: LINK