https:\/\/www.vox.com\/22570391\/afghanistan-taliban-biden-withdrawal<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“\u201cIs the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan inevitable?\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the question a reporter put to President Joe Biden this week at a press conference on the US\u2019s drawdown in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, it is not,\u201d Biden said, noting that Afghan government troops greatly outnumber the Taliban and are \u201cas well-equipped as any army in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
That may be true, but numbers alone don\u2019t tell the whole story. The Taliban has rapidly expanded its territorial control over the last week and is closing in on the capital, Kabul. On Monday, more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers reportedly fled into neighboring Tajikistan to escape a Taliban advance. A US intelligence assessment has said the Afghan government could fall in six months once US and other international troops leave.<\/p>\n
It makes it hard to see a Taliban takeover as anything other than extremely likely”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[435,552,272,355,314,1049,108,158],"class_list":["post-5834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-afghanistan","tag-conflict","tag-foreign-affairs","tag-foreign-policy","tag-international-relations","tag-taliban","tag-terrorism","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5834"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5835,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5834\/revisions\/5835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}