This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Friday, August 27th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The U.S. departure from Afghanistan is ugly, but how much of it was avoidable?

Will Ruger was President Trump's nominee for Ambassador to Afghanistan.

He's also a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. We spoke Wednesday

about the Taliban takeover and the costs of the so-called sustainable

stalemate in Afghanistan that many defenders of America's longest war wanted to

maintain. Between the Trump administration and the Biden administration, how much of a through line

is there in departure plans from Afghanistan?

Well, I think the most important throughline is the fact that President Biden essentially

accepted what the Trump administration had negotiated with the Taliban.

You know, so the Biden administration dither it a bit in terms of the review,

and that led to having to push the full withdrawal back and I think that was the problem.

But they did accept the basic premise which was that the United States needed to withdraw

militarily from Afghanistan, needed to end America's longest war, and that the reason for this was because it was in America's national interests and we could meet the minimal interest that we have in Afghanistan around

counterterrorism without a permanent troop presence. And I think the President

Biden has done a good job in terms of explicating the arguments for why, but the fact is that this was the Trump-Biden withdrawal and the Trump withdrawal

that Biden inherited and he chose the withdrawal over Biden's war.

And that's something that I think was really critical

about what President Trump did is it created

certain facts on the ground that made it more likely

that we were going to get a Trump-Biden withdrawal, not a continued permanent

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