Americans who did not fight in Vietnam or did not learn the lessons of the Vietnam War got us into Afghanistan ("Escape from Kabul," front page, Aug. 17). Now they are looking for someone to blame for the fiasco there. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are getting some of the blame. I have a different take on it: It's the Afghan military and people who are ultimately responsible for their own fate. After 20 years and over $2 trillion, you just can't say the U.S. didn't do enough.

When a 300,000-man Afghan military trained and equipped by the U.S. just gives up and flees without a fight, there is nobody else to blame. It makes you wonder if they really believed in what they were fighting for. I think we got the answer. In a poor country with few job opportunities, many joined the army to get a paycheck. They were not there to fight. And they don't really have strong beliefs about democracy and equal rights. Those are alien concepts. Afghanistan has been a tribal culture for thousands of years. Americans were delusional for thinking that could change.

The Americans were also delusional for thinking the Taliban and the Afghan government could share power. The two systems are completely incompatible. Do you really think the Taliban would allow national elections in a shared government?

For the past year the Afghans who helped the U.S. wanted desperately to come to the U.S. If they believed in their government and the Afghan military, they should have stayed and fought or wanted to. These people knew the Afghan army best. The fact that they all wanted to leave should have told us something. And what message does that send to Afghan soldiers?

If there is any justice, the thousands of Afghan refugees should be resettled in Texas and Wyoming. It would be a good reminder for the people who would like to rewrite history.

John Wong, Edina

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I admit I also procrastinated by not writing this letter months ago when it became clear you were not serious about bringing our Afghan friends out of harm's way. Shame on you, President Biden!

Jack Pick, Goodland, Minn.

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The finger-pointing and blame-gaming directed at the Biden administration's troop pullout is aimed at the wrong target. U.S. hubris is to blame, once again, for this 20-year fiasco. The original mission was to capture Osama bin Laden, who was holed up hiding somewhere. Then there was mission creep, just like in Vietnam. We failed to capture bin Laden until Navy SEALs attacked his compound in Pakistan many years later. The initial premise morphed into yet another U.S. effort to superimpose democratic principles and systems on a region that has been a collection of tribes for centuries.

The Taliban never left the region as they launched countless attacks on U.S. installations and Afghan forces. The U.S. kept its trillion-dollar finger in the dike for 20 years as successive administrations continued to feed money, men, guns, rockets, tanks, planes and other war hardware into a hopeless vortex. We were training and equipping the Afghans to be self-sufficient and every year the same decision was made: Stay another year and things will magically improve.

Biden put it well during his withdrawal announcement: Every year we have said we should stay just one more year. This will never end, so it is time to let the region be what it has always been with the faint hope that somehow life will improve for the victims of Taliban rule.

Regrettable consequences are inevitable but not our problem to solve.

John Drewitz, Minnetonka

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For those second-guessing Biden's decision on Afghanistan, just consider that Lyndon Johnson had the same decision in 1965, but chose the opposite path, committing more troops and money to a corrupt government with no interest fighting for itself. You cannot stop a people, like the American patriots in 1776, the Viet Cong in 1965 or the Taliban, who are committed to their cause.

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Given the rapid fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, many politicians and those in the media have drawn a parallel to the fall of Saigon in 1975. The comparison is apt; the images of thousands of Afghans clinging to military planes headed down the runway echo the embarrassing conclusion to the Vietnam War. The fall of Kabul, or "Biden's Saigon" as it has been dubbed, and the president's hardheaded defense of the withdrawal are strategically miscalculated and morally misguided.

From the outset of his campaign, Biden spoke of the "soul of America." It's a wonderful phrase if we take a moment to pause and consider it. Every nation has a sort of soul, and the state of this national soul is imperative to national unity. Despite radical differences in ideological views, many ordinary Americans share similar emotions and experiences when times are tough, tragedies strike and the nation faces an existential threat.

COVID-19 battered the soul of this nation. Government mismanagement, conflicting information, lockdowns and a summer of civil unrest each dealt a blow to the notion that America is an exceptional nation, however flawed, where there is always at least the possibility for hope. Ever divided by politics, Americans have increasingly turned on one another. It was this that Biden was purportedly able to remedy.

Consistently enunciated in the president's vision for a renewed "soul of America" was a recommitment to allies and alliances in the face of rising threats from Russia and China. Clearly, our allies in Afghanistan who risked their lives to help us oust the Taliban, root out al-Qaida and institute a government did not make the cut.

For some, perhaps for many, it will prompt a dark question: Is this who America is? Is this how we treat our friends? Of course, in due time, America will move on to new challenges and opportunities, as we always do. But many of our friends in Afghanistan will not, if they survive, and that's something that haunts the soul of a nation.

Samuel Viskocil, Minnetonka

State GOP Chair Jennifer Carnahan might want to think twice about calling for a vote of confidence from the executive committee ("Medina in court amid GOP scandal," Aug. 17). As a known associate of two accused sexual traffickers, she puts the committee in a particularly delicious quandary: Endorse her leadership and endure the slow drip of revelations over the course of the legal process, or kick her out and try to recruit another person to do the fundraising. She seems correct in assessing the character of her employers and may be betting on their apparent lack of moral sensitivity to keep her job. As her former White House idol once stated: only the best people.

George Hutchinson, Minneapolis