Our picks: AfghanistanWhat Comes Next? A Lesson from Saigon | Afghanistan: What Went Wrong? | The Real Reason Behind Biden’s Decision, and more

What Comes Next? A Lesson from Saigon  (Michael Desch, Defense One)
Rather than marking the eclipse of American power, withdrawal from Vietnam coincided with its spectacular increase.

Afghanistan: What Went Wrong?  (Michael Mandelbaum, American Purpose)
The defeat was two decades in the making, and repeats other American failures at other times in other places.

Could Afghanistan Become the Base for Another 9/11?  (Graham Allison, National Interest)
The ugly reality is that American presidents have to make hard choices from a menu that offers no good options. In choosing to withdraw, Biden accepted increased ownership of the risk that a Taliban-governed Afghanistan could indeed become the haven for a future mega-terrorist attack on the United States.

The U.S. Should Support Afghanistan’s Northern Resistance  (Shay Khatiri, The Bulwark)
The fighting remnant of the Afghan armed forces is now coalescing—and is Afghanistan’s last hope.

Our Afghan Disgrace  (David Hamburger, Persuasion)
America’s chaotic withdrawal is not a success. It should not be sold as one.

How Is the Taliban Gaining So Fast in Afghanistan?  (Jen Kirby, Vox)
An expert on the Taliban’s sweep and what it means for Afghanistan.

The Real Reason Biden Was Prepared to Let Kabul Fall  (Mary Dejevky, The Spectator)

The rushed, and at times chaotic, nature of the departure however should not be used as a reason for rejecting the actual decision to withdraw. The two things are different. And the question here — that may be disputed for a long time to come — is whether it was Biden’s decision to withdraw that made the Afghan situation unwinnable, or whether, as Andrew Watkins of the International Crisis Group argues, ‘the withdrawal decision was made because in Biden’s assessment, the situation already was unwinnable’.

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All these may be valid reasons — even if the Afghan army’s enthusiasm to fight may have been grievously overestimated by their trainers. But they are coming almost exclusively from one quarter: essentially from the elite. Listen to the vox pops, the phone-ins, read the below-the-line comments in the newspapers, and parts of social media, and you will get quite a different message.

This is, in summary, that the mission was always doomed. That no one, however technologically advanced or motivated, has even been able to bend the Afghan people to their will; that trying to remake Afghanistan as a democratic state on the Western model was a fool’s errand; that the UK should have left Afghanistan long ago, if it should ever have been there in the first place, and that, yes, the cost was too high: many deaths were in vain, and it is beyond time to leave. This message can also be heard from some military veterans and their families.

It is this message — above all the human cost to the United States and its allies — that President Biden has favored each time he has spoken in defense of his decision.