>>518808747
it's a little more nuanced than that.
we'd occupied the country for over a decade, achieved our goals of taking out Al Qaeda in the region and eliminating Bin Laden.
What we failed at was nation building, building a democratic nation that the people would support and would stand as a US ally after we left.
Which, we couldn't just occupy them forever, we had to plan a dismount. That'd been in the works toward the end of Trump's term, he wanted to leave Afghanistan, but yes the Taliban hadn't been totally wiped out. Trump negotiated with the Taliban and we didn't have a single casualty for over a year, and we were planning on leaving in 2021.
Biden got into office, decided that that timetable was too short and tried to extend it, without negotiating with the Taliban to do so.
So our remaining troops and staff were still there, past the initial agreed upon deadline that Trump had made with the Taliban. The Taliban hadn't accepted Biden's extended timetable, so they began making moves. We'd been slowly drawing down and had less than 5k troops left in Afghanistan, and we weren't going to be stopping the Taliban advances.
We expected the Afghanistan National Army, as Biden boasted, 300,000 strong, trained by the US, armed by the US, to hold off the Taliban.
Well they didn't. they either laid down their arms, or joined the Taliban.
Then the Afghani government we'd tried to set up, fell like a house of cards, and their president fled with a bunch of money.
In essence, our "loss" was not a military failing, it was failing to pick credible "friends" to run the country, and sticking around when we'd agreed to leave months before, and that part was on Biden.