President Biden made a misguided plan to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan immediately after taking office. He was more concerned with the look rather than the reality. As someone who served in the 25th Infantry Division, I can tell you that absolutely no commander is willing to leave the battlefield before the job is done, and the job in Afghanistan is far from done!

One of the concerns, unwarranted, was that we were becoming an occupational force in a country where we have been involved for 20 years. Really? Let us look around and you will quickly see that we have been an occupying force in Germany, Italy, Korea and Japan since 1945. What of that? In Korea we have committed 28,500 troops. And in Japan we have 39,000 troops! In Germany we have 34,000 troops. That is a total of over 100,000 troops.

Afghanistan is unstable and very likely to fall under the control of the Taliban before year’s end. This is extremely unnecessary since we should maintain a large military presence there. The army maintains 10 infantry style divisions on active duty. That comes to over 200,000 men. By simply splitting 2 divisions at a time for one year in Afghanistan, you would not be putting our men at risk for more than a minimal time.

The Afghan troops are failing miserably, many just quitting the fight even before it has begun and giving up bases and materials to the Taliban. There are a small number of elite forces who are struggling to push back against the Taliban but they simply lack the numbers to maintain the fight, let alone win it.

The Vietnam War shows us the inevitability of what will happen upon our departure. Now, as someone who was a part of that, I can say in that case we needed to withdraw as we lacked any commitment from the general public for us to stay. But you can see on YouTube how the last personnel leaving that country had the Vietcong hot on their tails. Although such a thing will not happen in Afghanistan, it will still happen in time.

If we are going to continue to be a true friend to the people of Afghanistan, we must recommit to having a large military presence in that country until its troops are fully and properly trained, and, until the country is both politically and economically stable. That will probably take a long time but for our own security, we need as many stable governments in the middle east as can happen.