Your mixed metaphors generate a lot more heat than light. As far as I can see the relevant facts are these. Because Trump had sent back so many American troops, and released so many Taliban fighters, Biden had to choose between defending Kabul and defending Bagram. It seems to me that Kabul was a better choice. It’s true that Bagram had more airfields, but Kabul was much nearer to the majority of people who needed to be evacuated. Those people would have had to travel over 30 miles to get from Kabul to Bagram, and the causalities and deaths that resulted from that journey would almost certainly have been much worse than the low single digits that resulted from Biden’s strategy.
Your ice cream metaphor only works if you assume that the evacuation suffered from a lack of military protection against gun-toting bad guys. In fact the Taliban did not kill a single evacuee. They promised the evacuees safe conduct, and kept their promise. . A bit of good luck, to make up somewhat for the fact that two trillion dollars couldn’t produce an Army that could hold the country for a couple of weeks. It was ISIS-K that was responsible for the few deaths and casualties that did occur, and like all terrorist events, their sabotage was not the sort of thing that could have been prevented by adding more soldiers. And now that we’re out, we can let the Taliban worry about ISIS-K’s activities in Afghanistan.
Here's Biden's defense of his strategy. Looks pretty convincing to me. If Biden did make mistakes, preventing them was not within the skill set of a wedding planner.
