Politico is literally a flaming pile of shit. No one expected an army of 300,000 to crumble in literal days.
Politico isn’t saying that this sudden of a collapse was predictable, it’s saying that the way in which the withdrawal was conducted has disappointed certain allies and especially Germany.
The collapse was unexpected, but this doesn’t change the fact that this looks very bad for Biden. He kept insisting that the Kabul government would be able to hold itself together for a while. Pushing through with the withdrawal makes it look like the US was completely blind to just how weak the government was, or that they just don’t care about the consequences even though their allies do.
But the disappointment at the US withdrawal really started while the agreement was being negotiated. Germany and a few other were annoyed that they were never asked what they thought of the negotiations even though they had troops there. They were just expected to follow along with whatever the US decided.
Once the negotiations ended, the taliban took advantage of the fact that the US wasn’t committed to this war to constantly break it.The US did very little in reaction to this, the only major reaction being Biden extending the withdrawal deadline, but none of this was anywhere close to what was needed.
The final problem is that all these issues stayed basically the same under both Trump and Biden. Europeans didn’t like Trump’s foreign policy and many hoped that Biden would mark a shift since he made a big deal of working with allies. However, so far there only been surface-level changes and it doesn’t look like Biden is willing to really invest into these relations.
Germany has been the most vocal about it, since it’s a bigger country that people will listen to, but this looks especially bad for small countries like Estonia which 1- base their entire defence policy around being allied to the US 2- commit a lot of ressources (on a per capita basis) to US operations to show that they’re good allies. There were a lot of hopes after Biden was elected, but so far it looks like 1- US leadership is either highly misinformed about potential consequences of their actions, or maybe they just don’t care (even though some allies do) 2- Trump’s foreign policy was not an anomaly but a slightly more aggressive version of the new normal 3- US commitment to military operations is declining 4- the US isn’t willing to listen to allies even when they’ve committed a lot of ressources to help the US
Overall, nobody thinks that leaving Afghanistan was a bad idea in and of itself, the criticism is about the way in which it was done and what that says about the US’ relationship to it allies going forward.