“For months, refugee organizations and military officials had urged the Administration to begin evacuating Afghans who had backed the U.S. effort. The White House demurred, worried that such a move would signal a lack of faith in the Afghan government. As a result, the operation, crammed into the span of a few weeks, was unnecessarily rushed and poorly planned.” David Rohde in The New Yorker: Biden’s Chaotic Withdrawal from Afghanistan Is Complete.

+ “Many Americans are now fond of saying, knowingly, that the war was unwinnable because it’s Afghanistan—graveyard of empires, a rugged land filled with proud people who are happy to fight to the death. But that kind of breezy dismissal just allows us to avoid the embarrassing conversation about what actually went wrong … If there could be a sure thing in warfare, this was it—and we blew it.” Sebastian Junger in Vanity Fair: How the US Corrupted Afghanistan.

+ The last American troops are out of Kabul. Here’s the latest from BBC.