The end of the Afghanistan war was even worse than anyone realized

This vast pile of evidence, Coll and Entous write, amounts to “a dispiriting record of misjudgment, hubris, and delusion.” They could have added to that list of adjectives: self-delusion, incompetence, and sheer mendacity. Not that getting out of Afghanistan was a bad idea. But the way our leaders got out should shock even a jaded observer of shady politics.

Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, as well as some of their top aides, come off rather badly in the article. It is no secret that Trump wanted out of Afghanistan from the get-go. After a brief spell, when his generals convinced him to try out their new strategy of victory (which was neither new nor much of a strategy), he hired Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-born-and-bred diplomat (and former U.S. ambassador to Kabul), to negotiate a deal with the Taliban. The real goal of these talks, an aide to Khalilzad told the New Yorker reporters, was to get our troops out of there in six to nine months.

Khalilzad is a well-known Washington figure, an experienced operator with a debonair flair. In this story, he’s also a self-aggrandizing snake. It has long been reported that he kept Afghan President Ashraf Ghani out of his negotiations with the Taliban; that’s what Trump wanted him to do. It turns out he kept U.S. officials in the dark as well. Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Iraq, is quoted as likening Khalilzad’s evasive approach to an Arab proverb: “It is good to know the truth and speak it, but it is better to know the truth and speak of palm trees.”