HOT AIR BALLOON FLIGHT

Biden is not only responsible for the decision to withdraw US troops, wrote Alice Stewart, but also for the policy's execution. "In a matter of days, the Taliban have overrun the country and assumed control of Kabul, while thousands of Afghans, afraid for their lives, attempt to flee on flights bound for Europe, the US and elsewhere."

 

Throughout Biden's eight years as vice president, he stood out among Obama administration figures in consistently opposing the war in Afghanistan, as David Axelrod noted.

 

"As Biden said in his televised remarks Monday, the fact that the Afghan security forces in which we invested so much were abjectly ill-prepared and unwilling to take up their own defense was a pretty fair sign that they never would be," wrote Axelrod.

 

"Yet the argument for leaving doesn't explain or justify the chaotic manner in which we did. There is shame in those images of Afghans who for years had helped support our efforts, chasing US military aircraft down runways in a desperate attempt to escape Taliban reprisals."

 

Did Biden "carry some of the scars of his past battles over Afghanistan into his decision-making as Commander-in Chief? Was he so determined not to be cowed by the Pentagon, as perhaps he felt Obama was, that he ignored warnings he should have heeded?" (For a former CIA official's analysis of what went wrong, read Peter Bergen's interview with Douglas London.)

 

The video images of the week drew comparisons to the 1975 American evacuation from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. But historian Julian Zelizer observed that "the collapse of Afghanistan is unlikely to be a decisive political issue." For one thing, the Saigon retreat wasn't the factor that resulted in President Gerald Ford's defeat by Jimmy Carter; he was brought down by the economy and the aftermath of Watergate. And the Afghanistan War never occupied the psychic space in America that Vietnam did, Zelizer wrote.

 

"The conflict over the war had literally consumed American life. There had been a massive anti-war movement that made the war an unavoidable topic in college campuses, churches, schools, civic institutions, newspapers and television, political campaigns, and more. Given that there had been a draft in place until 1973, every American family had been forced to wrestle with the possibility that their child would end up being sent into this deadly conflict -- and many were. Vietnam was woven into popular music, film, and fiction. In other words, the Vietnam War had been everywhere in American life for over a decade."

 

In The New York Times, Michael Kazin suggested that "as the public's attention shifts away from Afghanistan, Mr. Biden's decision may seem less like a failure and more like a sober, even necessary end to a policy that was doomed from the start." But the stakes are still huge for Biden and his party: "The president and his fellow Democrats face a political environment so daunting that even the slightest disruption could derail their domestic agenda."

In Texas, as in Florida, some local school boards are defying their governors' orders prohibiting schools from mandating masks. Stephen I. Vladeck, who teaches law at the University of Texas and has two young children, noted that his state's governor, Greg Abbott, wasn't swayed even after his own breakthrough case of Covid-19.

 

"This debate isn't about 'freedom' in any analytically coherent sense," Vladeck wrote. "It's about the politicization of a specific public health crisis — where 'owning the libs' has become a policy priority, especially for those, like Governor Abbott, who seem to be clamoring for attention and support. There ought to be some things more important than scoring political points. I would have thought that the health and well-being of our children would be close to the top of that list."

 

In Michigan, teacher Caroline Nyczak is thankful that she's vaccinated and can feel safe teaching in person. "It baffles me why any teacher would choose not to get the vaccine, especially if they know they will inevitably be working with unvaccinated children," she observed. "Vaccinated teachers are one of the only ways to ensure safe classrooms, effective learning, and healthy children."

 

Booster shots are on the way for most Americans this fall, health officials announced Wednesday, citing evidence that the protection offered by vaccines wanes over time. "The booster makes a lot of sense," wrote Dr. Kent Sepkowitz. "What we must not do, however is assume the third shot is the charm.  Rather, the boost is another temporary measure that will provide months of less worry. Because -- spoiler alert -- Israel has already shown the third shot provides a real but only transient protection against infection. Even after three vaccines, some people are still getting infected.

More than 2,100 people died and more than 12,000 were injured by the major earthquake that struck Haiti last weekend. It came a little more than a month after the assassination of Haiti's president, Jovenel Moise, and 11 years after an even more devastating quake. "The images, this time coming from Les Caye rather than the leveled capitol city Port-au-Prince, have dominated social media," noted Peniel E. Joseph. "Rescue operations and international aid have been amassed but are experiencing great difficulty reaching inhabitants in the epicenter of the quake."

 

The narrative of Haiti's compounding crises is only part of the nation's story, Joseph wrote. "Haiti is neither irreparably broken nor perpetually resilient. The island, likes its people, contains multitudes. Until American foreign policy, as well as the international community, fesses up to the historic and continuing influence they play in Haitian affairs we will continue to interpret this unfolding history in isolation without realizing that it is in fact, a mirror."

Jason Amerine was there at the beginning. The now-retired Green Beret lieutenant colonel led a team of American special forces troops that worked with Afghan leader (and later President) Hamid Karzai to wrest control of the country from the Taliban, which had sheltered al Qaeda terrorists who attacked the US on September 11, 2001.

 

After ousting the Taliban, the Bush administration moved ahead with the invasion of Iraq in the false belief that its leader Saddam Hussein had worked with al Qaeda and had weapons of mass destruction. When the Iraq adventure morphed into a civil war, the US needed Pakistan's help in resupplying its troops, and so couldn't press that nation to clamp down on the Taliban in Afghanistan, Amerine wrote.

 

"Years of benign neglect followed in Afghanistan as Kabul and all our Afghan allies became more and more alienated by America's lack of action to combat the Taliban," Amerine wrote. "Our mission in 2001 was to remove the terrorist safe havens of Afghanistan. It was an act of revenge. I was proud to see it evolve into something more as little girls went to school and women were allowed to vote. But now the noblest gains of our mission are lost and we are left to say, 'At least we got Bin Laden.' It just rings so hollow to me," Amerine noted.

"Afghan women have been used as political pawns and treated more as symbols than humans by powerful people (mostly men) on all sides of the conflict," wrote Jill Filipovic. "Now, no one has more to lose than Afghanistan's women. And no one is owed a greater debt. They aren't going to get their deserved honor from the brutal and miserable fundamentalists taking over their country. Which is why the US and every other nation that participated in this war must open its doors and welcome whichever women, and their families, want to leave Afghanistan and have a shot at a safe life."

 

Zarlasht Halaimzai fled Afghanistan as a 15-year-old in 1992 with her family, settling in the UK. "As violence intensified, my family fled the conflict that would eventually result in the Taliban's first takeover of the country," she wrote. "Now, after footage of desperate people chasing a plane on an airport tarmac went viral, I am shocked at the muted response from governments around the world, which have not done nearly enough to address the man-made humanitarian disaster unfolding before us. The US and its partners have argued that Afghanistan is no longer their responsibility -- that they did what they could and sacrificed too much for a country that apparently Afghans don't want to fight for. But they grossly mischaracterize just how hard Afghans have fought for democratic freedoms."

 

Nick Ochsner was 12 when his dad told him he was headed for a US military posting in Afghanistan. "He was excited; I was excited," Ochsner wrote.

 

"My dad lived for being a soldier, had since he was a kid. He'd just spent nearly two years in grueling Special Forces training to become a Green Beret. He jumped at the prospect of putting his new skills to use. And in those heady, patriotic days following 9/11, the chance to go meet the enemy and get revenge sounded good, too."

 

On Jimmy's Ochsner's fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan -- his fourth in four years -- he was killed by a roadside bomb near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

 

"Two decades of war. Thousands of lives lost. Trillions of dollars spent," Ochsner wrote. "The Taliban has retaken the country my dad and thousands of others died fighting to free from future oppression. If my dad were alive today, I know he would be worried about the thousands of Afghans who risked their lives and their families' security in service to an America that has now left many of them stranded, helpless, behind enemy lines."

Paris Hilton coined the word, "sliving," which, as Holly Thomas wrote, equals "slaying and living." The heiress and social media star has a new Netflix show, "Cooking with Paris."

 

"Critics are taking issue with Hilton as host of a show about food, but be under no illusion, this woman isn't pretending she can cook. In fact, she's probably pretending she can't, but that hasn't deterred much of the internet from scoffing at her poor culinary skills, and wondering at the point of a food show that doesn't include knockout recipes. Let the woman sliv!"