... it was reneging on the May 1 deadline.That reinforced the usual US lesson to the world ("never, ever, ever trust the US government to keep its word"), and it benefited the Taliban both in that public relations sense and strategically.
Some of the critics (consisting of people who 1) supported the Afghanistan fiasco, 2) supported extending the Afghanistan fiasco for two decades, and 3) would continue supporting extending it for two more centuries if they lived that long) are now whining about how it would have been soooooooooo much less terrible if Biden had simply extended the deadline to the beginning of winter.
The logic: Fighting dies down in the winter. It's difficult for the Taliban to conduct offensive operations, while the US puppet regime, being on the strategic defensive, gets time to improve and reinforce its positions.
They're not wrong, but that logic would have equally supported getting out by May 1 or even earlier, instead of giving the Taliban four extra months to develop offensive momentum in good fighting weather.
Biden came into office quibbling that the agreed withdrawal date was just too soon and couldn't be met. He was lying. The withdrawal was well under way before his inauguration, and if it needed to be sped up he had more than three months to speed it up instead of hemming and hawing.
As for puppet president Ghani's complaint that the US withdrawal was "abrupt," he had 15 months' notice plus that four-month extension.
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