The American sniper who killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011 said that what had happened to the United States in Afghanistan was pathetic, and expressed his anger and sadness at his country's horrific failure, and believed that the United States should have left Afghanistan in 2005.

In an interview with the French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche (LeJDD), former US Navy Seal Robert O'Neill - who is considered a hero in his country - saw the Taliban's seizure of power at the end of 20 years of the American presence, a failure that arouses "anger and many Sadness," noting that the United States moved away from its original plan, because "defeating al-Qaeda was our road map."

In an interview with Karen Lagoon, the newspaper's special envoy in New York City, the soldier said that the United States should have left Afghanistan in 2005, and that it was enough for it at that time to drop a few bombs by air to eliminate the "terrorists", as he put it, because it knew where they were.

O'Neill believed that 2011 was the right time for America to leave Afghanistan, after completing the mission with the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, but this story - as O'Neill says - was treated with hidden political motives and not with pragmatism and realism.

The former soldier added, "What is happening today has nothing to do with what we hoped for, it is pathetic. What was required was to kill Osama bin Laden and try to eliminate al-Qaeda, but without leaving such a void that ISIS will fill once the Taliban control, because the organization will do likewise." What he did in Iraq and Syria.

We left everything to them

As O'Neill explained, the result of the intervention against the Taliban is that "we now leave to them everything, our equipment, our weapons, our light armored vehicles, and the helicopters that they don't know how to use yet.

"Watching such confusion is shameful," he said, especially as it gave the Taliban the opportunity to build their myth that after the British and Russians, it was the Americans' turn to get out of Afghanistan, and on top of that, the movement did not have to fight to achieve that.

When asked whether the performance of former President Donald Trump was better than the performance of current President Joe Biden, O'Neill said that the matter is not clear, noting that Washington has often had to deal with the Taliban, and the sad reality has sometimes prompted it to negotiate with the movement, even If it was a bad thing, and they have often proven to her that they don't want her democracy, he added, "I think Trump would have done it differently."

With regard to the story of bin Laden's killing, O'Neill expressed his pride in participating in that operation, from which he said that those who participated in it did not believe that they would return alive.