From TimesOfIsrael.com…
Allies and critics alike on Monday condemned the United States over its 20-year NATO campaign in Afghanistan, with a leading German politician slamming the operation as “the biggest debacle” in the alliance’s history.
Stunned by the Taliban’s lightning advance across the country after the departure of Western troops, NATO allies have been left scrambling to evacuate their nationals as well as vulnerable Afghans.
The Taliban’s return to power and chaotic scenes of people desperately seeking to flee Kabul on Western military aircraft have sparked criticism of the two-decade operation, which cost the alliance thousands of lives and over a trillion dollars.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said the US-led NATO operation achieved less than planned, adding she shared the pain of families of soldiers killed “as it seems right now like it was all in vain.”
The deployment effectively ended Al-Qaeda’s ability to launch another operation on the scale of its September 11, 2001 attack on the United States, but “everything else that has followed has not been as successful and has not been achieved in the way that we had planned,” Merkel said.
