1. A big thing I see driving the Afghanistan conversation that no one is talking about is something I've seen quite often in 40 years in journalism: People's personal relationships -- a.k.a., access journalism -- matters more than looking at the big picture
2. There's a large foreign policy community -- especially journalists at places like NYT or WP who worship "objectivity" 99% of the time -- for whom Afghanistan is personal. They have human ties there, with no greater priority -- human nature, understandable -- than...
3 ...keeping their friends alive. It's like when you have a family member in the hospital -- you're suddenly not on a soapbox about the outrageous cost of U.S. healthcare. These folks could never support leaving Afghanistan to the inevitable, and I understand why. Thus...
4. It's on the rest of us without personal ties to point out the obvious bigger picture: That a government that collapses in days without America propping them up wasn't worth $2.2 trillion and thousands of U.S. lives. Biden was right to leave but...
5. ...I think we can all also agree Biden should have seen how fast the end would come and have been faster and smarter about evacuating our allies. That needs to be the focus now. We're way behind the 8-ball, but in the best world we save our Afghan allies yet also...
6. ...be honest with ourselves, that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was the height of wasteful, imperial folly, that our role had to end some time and that time was always going to be ugly - 30 -
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