“This [prisoner swap] problem is something the Trump administration should’ve anticipated, or at least done more to manage beforehand. Experts note that the Taliban has long asked for a large prisoner release ahead of talks. That the US made it a precondition before the Afghan government and the Taliban can sit down was always going to rankle the government in Kabul… Afghanistan is still a long, long way from peace.”
Alex Ward, Vox

Nonetheless, “Americans have long run out of good reasons to continue dying and killing in a land whose many tribes make it notoriously difficult to govern and whose mountainous terrain renders it all but impossible to conquer. American soldiers deployed to the country as recently as last [week] had trouble articulating what their mission there was, short of making it home in one piece… President Trump has made no secret of his aversion to foreign military entanglements, and he pledged to get the troops out. It’s an election year, but the politics of the moment should not obscure the fact that ending American involvement in the war is the right thing to do.”
Editorial Board, New York Times

“I have no doubt that if Barack Obama had signed such a deal with the Taliban, he would have been pilloried by the same Republican politicians and Fox News pundits now cheering Trump’s agreement. Obama, for example, was scorned and slammed for releasing five Taliban detainees in exchange for a captured U.S. soldier, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, in 2014; Trump, on the other hand, has agreed to the release of an astonishing 5,000 Taliban prisoners… [But] What’s the alternative?… credit where credit is due… the Trump administration was able to achieve in its first term what the Bush and Obama administrations were either unable or unwilling to do over two terms each.”
Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept

The right is divided about the US-Taliban deal.Some argue that “When it comes to the Afghan war, the mistake was not in the intervention itself, rather in how it was managed. Soon after the initial invasion crippled the Taliban and sent it into hiding, its leadership consistently asked to meet at the negotiating table, but were rebuffed… This was a mistake. Talks could have brought a reduction in NATO involvement under better terms than are being agreed now. The intervention could have been conducted with a pragmatism that acknowledged the impossibility of all-out military victory and brought the Taliban to the table early…

“There are many examples of effective intervention and long-term presence, and they're not obscure: Japan, Taiwan, and Eastern Europe have their own, complex, imperfect stories, but each is a relatively stable, prosperous beneficiary of many decades of political and military investment… Another, lesser known example is the British-led United Nations involvement in Sierra Leone, in which military intervention ended a violent decade-long civil war… Rather than vacillating between opposite doctrines that say intervening is good or not, or realistic or not, democracies should be engaging their collective thought to get better at it.”
William Gritten, The Week