Another black border post.
 

The US again abandons tens of thousands of allies, workers, helpers to their fate.

(Update, border not so thick as it was, see first comment. The US and other countries seem to be trying to help Afghans leave.)

Update, 25 August Black border removed entirely. The US and other nations involved there are working hard to get people out. It is, I hear, one of the biggest civilian evacuations ever. Much as I was down on Biden before he was elected, biting this bullet of US mistakes in Afghanistan deserves respect.
 

Should the US have stayed in Afghanistan on the plea that insanity forced it to keep doing the same failing thing, over and over, year after year? No.

It should never have been there, if that’s all they were going to do.

Is there anything they could have done that would have actually made a difference?

Yes.

Elect Al Gore.

And even that would have helped only if he’d had the courage to do real nation building.

Since it’s a country that throws away half it’s population right from the start, before even inventing ways to exploit the remainder, the first step for nation building in Afghanistan was always clear.

Help women.

Change the laws so they could have their own money, land, and wealth, and enforce it. Make sure girls received educations all the way through high school. Put women’s health and medical care on a serious and effective footing. Provide millions of scholarships for women to study in the world’s great universities.

After twenty years of that, with women therefore becoming more important than testosterone-poisoned defectives in families, workplaces and government, there’d be a different country now.

Of course, no senator could have boasted about bringing dollars home to his district because Blackhawk helicopters got sold to Afghanis. Nobody could have stood on the deck of a naval ship after a couple of years, declaring victory.

The kind of victory I’m talking about takes much longer.

If nobody was going to do anything real victory required, the US should have stayed home.

Biden is right to correct that part of the error. A deathly shame, though, that he thought he could wait for the paperwork before rescuing the women and men who have been betrayed.