I'm an international security buff, so this may be a little wonky, but I'll try to keep it succinct:
"The Morning" newsletter from NYT today basically spent half of its words on the idea that there were "no real alternatives" to a highly chaotic withdrawal and evacuation. In a basic sense, that's true. The US (and Nato) lost the war, and this is what losing a war looks like - evacuation is challenging and messy, former (domestic) allies are identified and murdered by the new regime, etc.
On the other hand, there are a number of very simple things Biden could/should have done that would mitigate some of the disasters of the past two weeks.
#1 The most obvious would be to agree to delay until Winter, as the Afghani officials directly requested this past Spring. Combat operations (particularly major ones like the Taliban executed in the past 8 days to retake the country) are really hard to do in the Afghanistan Winter, so there is usually a sharp drop off of Taliban offensives each Winter. Waiting until November to evacuate would give the Afghani forces time to prepare defenses and give them a better chance of resisting a major Taliban offense in the Spring. Instead, Biden rejected this idea from the Afghani government (which was essentially installed by Biden's predecessors, note), with no serious explanation given as to why.
#2 Biden should also have ensured the operational plans for the withdrawal were far more secret, and less public. It was both a strategic and tactical blunder to announce specific dates (Trump was guilty of this too), and then this blunder is being further amplified by doubling down on not modifying it no matter what is happening. I believe this blunder stems from a belief that the Taliban will inevitably re-take Afghanistan. But it wasn't inevitable as recently as 1 year ago.
#3 And thirdly, and perhaps the most critical, it would have been ridiculously simple to send a very large contingent - say two whole divisions of the US army, and perhaps a few regiments (or even just two battalions) of US marines to the area to explicitly assist in the evacuation and withdrawal. If I'm correct that one reason we foolishly announced loud and clear how and when we're withdrawing is partially because Biden assumes the Taliban will rapidly take over (as they did), then it's even stupider that he didn't provide a large force to simply protect the evacuation and withdrawal itself. Yes, if we did this the Taliban would believe we are launching new offensives and expanding the war, when we bring in more combat units. So? That would make them more cautious to try a rapid offensive to re-take Kabul under the circumstances. The Taliban has no illusions believing they can win any combined arms battle. They didn't even attack our forces en masse even once from 2014 to this year, when we had a paltry 14000 military personnel or so. There are other challenges created with this last idea, but suffice it to say, it would be eminently possible and allow us to evacuate and withdraw without the level of chaos we've seen.
It is framed in news, polls, and pretty much everywhere that this is "the long war" that we are still fighting after two decades. Sort of. One of the most common misunderstandings about the war at all is the role US and NATO forces play. Since 2014, when Enduring Freedom ended and Freedom's Sentinel took over, nearly all combat operations have been spearheaded by domestic Afghani forces. The US and NATO militaries have provided training, logistical support, air support (which is key), and some small scale anti-terrorism support (i.e., special forces type operations). For seven years the US and NATO militaries haven't really been conducting a war, per se. The Afghani domestic forces have. We've just been supporting them to ensure they persist.
I'm not saying we necessarily should have stayed eternally, but given US combat deaths dropped to double digits yearly in 2014, it's clear this "war" is the calmest and least deadly war the US has ever been involved in. (One way to measure that is the war has been going for about 239 months, and we've had 1833 combat deaths. That's an average of 7.6 per month. Even the first Gulf War would be reckoned at like 149 deaths per month (for a MUCH shorter war), and something like 40 per month on average for the Iraq War (2003-2011). The only "wars" in which the US has had something like 7 deaths per month on average are not wars at all, but individual, isolated operations (the various imperial interventions our commanders in chief are so fond of (particularly ALL the presidents from Reagan through Obama)).
My point is that we could have drawn down very differently, over more time, done far more professionally and strategically. But we didn't.
What makes this more infuriating is that the primary role of a president, per the US constitution, is to deal with foreign policy (NOT domestic policy). Sadly, over the decades, the US presidency has grown like a cancer to be at least as much (if not more) about domestic politics than dealing with other nations. If Biden ran his presidency like he should, according to his enumerated powers, I think he would have handled it very differently. But his focus is on other matters that are really the province of Congress and the states. Alas.
Would Trump have done any of these things, or done them better? Perhaps not. He was not a brilliant president (though nor was he an abject failure - rather middle of the road in effectiveness, IMO, once you take away the heightened emotions surrounding everything to do with him). But I can see Trump listening to his military advisors more closely on something like this.