Collapse

The Taliban are staging a very rapid reconquista of Afghanistan, apparently taking our intelligence and military experts by complete surprise in spite of 20 years of investments in knowing what is going on in that country. They're capturing major amounts of war materiel we have apparently left behind for them (probably they can't long maintain the Blackhawks and MRAPs, even if they can operate them;  hopefully they'll find good use for the small arms supporting the righteous cause of their brother Muslim Uighurs). 

It's bad enough that we spent 20 years training an Afghan army that fell apart at the first touch. It's worse that we had absolutely no idea of how strong the Taliban was even at the last. There was no successful infiltration by these intelligence agencies with the infinite black budgets, no visibility on what they were capable of doing. 

The real lesson is that our institutions have failed. The military never lost a gunfight above the squad level, but they never came close to attaining the conditions for winning the war -- or even understanding what was possible in a place like Afghanistan. The intelligence services are complete failures. The brass should be cashiered, almost across the board; the intelligence community disbanded and replaced. 

But so too so many of our institutions, which are ossified and immobile, helpless and beyond reform. This includes the institutions that would be tasked with reform, such as Congress. 

The Soviet Union did not long survive its adventure in Afghanistan; it may well be that the US Federal Government will not either. Afghanistan itself was too far away to wound us, though it bled us of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Yet the rot it reveals in our institutions looms like a sudden terminal diagnosis in the life of a man.