Only if your reading comprehension is ZERO!
I actually went to the NYT interview itself and this is very clearly their opinion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/us/politics/seth-moulton-peter-meijer-kabul-afghanistan.htmlSome cherry-picked quotes:
Walk me through what you saw when you first got to the airport.
Mr. Meijer: There were I think close to 20,000 individuals who were waiting on flights out a day or two before we arrived. When we were there, the Air Force and the other personnel on the ground had so efficiently moved those individuals to intermediate staging locations that there were some people there, but it was by no means an overwhelming number waiting for flights. It was probably in the few hundreds.
Mr. Moulton: This is one of the most complicated operations that the U.S. military has done in decades. It’s so bad because the administration did not follow our advice for months and start the evacuation earlier. But in the space of a few days, the Marines and soldiers in Kabul have turned this from utter chaos into an orderly evacuation — or at least as orderly as you can hope for in this truly crazy environment.
What are some of the takeaways that you want to share with your colleagues in Congress and the broader public?
Mr. Moulton: Almost every veteran in Congress wants to extend the Aug. 31 deadline, including us, and our opinion on that was changed on the ground, because we started the evacuations so late. There’s no way we can get everyone out, even by Sept. 11. So we need to have a working relationship with the Taliban after our departure. And the only way to achieve that is to leave by Aug. 31.
Mr. Meijer: It is utterly bizarre and baffling that we’re in this position. To go from having the Taliban as an adversary we’re seeking to kill, to relying upon them for security, coordinating to make sure things run smoothly. It’s a complicated situation that’s impossible to understand if you’re not on the ground and yet critical to saving the lives of tens of thousands.
