The New York Times’s Ross Douthat has an excellent column that argues President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was disastrous, shameful, and a long time coming.

For more than 20 years, our institutions pushed the American public to believe that our military presence in Afghanistan was not only necessary, but good. We were rebuilding a war-torn, corrupt, and hellish region and turning it into a functioning democratic society, according to the Bush and Obama administrations, which found support in just about every nook and cranny of Washington’s power-hungry establishment.