A long, but worthwhile essay on the current state of affairs after the ghastly fall of Afghanistan.

[Update mid-afternoon]

The Afghanistan debacle was the end of the liberal world order.

…never saw what hit him.

He never does. He never will.

“‘That’s it. It’s over,’ a U.S. official said.

The official is wrong. The fall of Kabul is just the beginning of the horrific fallout from Biden’s decisions.”

This isn't the worst foreign-policy failure since Saigon. It's worse than that. The Europeans are saying "WTF? We weren't ready to pull out."

"America is back," my ass. We have rewarded our enemies, and abandoned all of our allies. Just as we did under Obama, but much worse. https://t.co/RZfttpeYQX

— Not-So-OK Boomer (@Rand_Simberg) August 15, 2021

[Update a while later]

All Biden had to do was…nothing:

…the really awful part is, this was entirely predictable—because everybody I know predicted it. We didn’t know when exactly. But we knew it was coming. If we knew it, they knew it. If they didn’t know it, it’s because they chose not to know it. Or decided to let the chips fall where they may. Now the chips have fallen with one of the most evil political forces the world has ever seen back in charge of the government from which we rousted them 20 years ago.

We stand exposed today not as a country that finally exited a war we could no longer even imagine a victory in, as had been the case in 1975. Rather, we are revealed as a country led by a feckless president who chose to refuse to grapple with the obvious potential consequences of a decision he wanted to make so he could be declared a war-ender and a peace-maker. History will declare him something else, something worse, something darker. The real horror for Afghanis is that history will begin to make its declaration about Joe Biden this week, as the Taliban begin working their depravity on them and the nation from which we once rightly took great national pride in having liberated.

It didn’t even take a year for him to be the worst president in recent memory.

[Update a few minutes later]

Mark Steyn: The scale of a humiliation.

[Update a few more minutes later]

Handing over Afghanistan to the Taliban is Biden’s folly, not Trump’s.

[Update early afternoon]

Joe Biden’s garbage foreign-policy instincts.

[Monday-afternoon update]

Yes, Joe Biden should resign, but so should Lloyd Austin.

Neither of them will, of course. And if the president were to do so, we’d have the wonderful prospect of a President Harris, and the s**tshow would continue.