The Post published this story last night. There are really two parts to it, both of them objectively bad news. First, there is evidence that jihadists are excited about the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. They are already thinking about how this could lead to a resurgence of groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Foreign intelligence officials said they are detecting signs that the Taliban’s victory has energized global jihadists, a threat that may only grow as the Taliban releases al-Qaeda operatives who were imprisoned by the Afghan government.

An intelligence official from an Arab nation, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe evolving assessments, said officials had seen an uptick in jihadist communications about developments in Afghanistan. The Taliban takeover, this official said, “is encouraging many jihadists to think about traveling to Afghanistan now instead of Syria or Iraq.”

According to a European intelligence official, the Taliban’s victory has become a rallying cry for jihadist sympathizers there. “The U.S. appears in all of this now as a weak nation,” he said.

An al-Qaeda fighter who goes by the name Abu Khaled said the Taliban’s conquest was momentous for all extremists. “God willing, the success of the Taliban will be also a chance to unify mujahideen movements like al-Qaeda and Daesh,” he said, using another name for the Islamic State.

That would be bad enough but the other focus of the story is that the fall of Afghanistan means our ability to monitor what these groups are doing has just dropped substantially. Why? Because the bulk of our counterterrorism efforts in the area were built upon having a friendly government in Afghanistan that allowed us to continue to operate there. With the Taliban in charge, it’s a near certainty that Americans won’t be able to operate there at all, making it much more difficult to gather intelligence.

Now, most if not all of the capabilities the United States had envisioned within Afghanistan are no longer possible…

The Biden administration also planned to continue intelligence operations out of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, working with the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan spy agency built by the CIA, to manage agents across the country. Officials would also use satellites and local listening posts to scoop up communications intercepts, attempting to keep militant plotting in check.

As the saying goes, what could possibly go wrong?

Even as all of this is happening, the Biden media constituency is pushing very hard (in the same paper) to claim that the media have been too harsh in judging the president.

The situation is tragic, no doubt, and the images of the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul on Sunday are stunningly memorable, but the blame has to be spread much more evenly. Biden has been in office for just over seven months; the always untenable Afghan war — and its sure-to-be-terrible ending — has been a disaster for decades. It cuts across political parties: begun by a Republican, George W. Bush, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and presided over by two Obama terms and four years of Trump…

Maybe the pullout from Afghanistan really will go down as Biden’s Waterloo. But maybe deciding that should take more than a few hours.

Margaret Sullivan claims what is needed is nuance and a thoughtful response to partisanship but what she really wants is to silence Biden’s critics. No, not the gentle critics in the left-leaning media who can usually be persuaded to tone it down but the real critics who can’t.

In a sense, you can’t blame establishment lefties for pulling on whatever levers they have at their disposal. Dems have seen a series of setbacks lately. The governor of New York resigned and they are in danger of losing the governor of California as well. Now they’re seeing the president taking some serious hits seven months into his tenure and they are nearing panic not unlike the Afghans who were streaming onto the tarmac in Kabul.

Al Qaeda may be getting the band back together in Afghanistan thanks in part to Joe Biden’s bumbled withdrawal and if Biden were a Republican the Democrats would never stop talking about it. As it is, they are hoping they can work the refs in the media to stop this fight before a shot to the jaw leaves their entire party face down on the mat next November.