"The United States' effort to strengthen the Afghan security forces has come to an ignominious end. The U.S. military spent 20 years and $83 billion building up a force that melted away in a matter of weeks, ceding the country to the Taliban over that period with barely a shot fired.

"The swift collapse of the Afghan security forces is not an outlier. In fact, it is closer to the norm for local security forces built up with U.S. military assistance. The United States' three largest efforts to build partner militaries -- in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan -- have all failed spectacularly. There is good reason the images coming out of Kabul conjure up Saigon in 1975 and Mosul in 2014.

"What the military calls 'security force assistance,' 'security force assistance,' 'building partner capacity,' or 'tran-and-equip operations' remains a pillar of U.S. defense strategy. Setting Afghanistan and Iraq entirely aside, the United States spends billions of dollars every year and deploys thousands of personnel to train and assist foreign militaries from countries all over the world. Although the purpose of such assistance varies, its main goal is to increase the capacity of partner militaries to shoulder local security burdens so that the United States can shift its own resources to higher priorities.

"The problem, however, is that the United States' partners are often uninterested in building militaries that can fight. As Georgetown University Professor Caitlin Talmadge has shown, political and military leaders have to foster the promotion of competent officers, enforce a chain of command, encourage rigorous training, and put a lid on corruption to create an effective force. But in the weak or failed states where the United States focuses its security assistance, leaders often prioritize their personal and political survival over strengthening their nations' militaries. These leaders often aim to use their military as a source of patronage or as a cudgel against their domestic political opponents. They may welcome the largess of U.S. military assistance, but they fear building a professional force that could threaten their own power. So they ignore the pleas of U.S. military advisers, implementing policies that keep their militaries weak. ...

"Too often, the United States' efforts to train and equip foreign militaries have been motivated by bureaucratic logic rather than sound strategy. The fall of Kabul exposed more than the rot within the armies the United States builds. It also exposed the rot within the United States' approach to building them."

Read the entire article here.

"It is appropriate that House Democrats wore masks at their press conference following passage along party lines of their bill allowing Democrats to permanently steal every election in America. Gushing with platitudes about 'voting rights' and 'access to the ballot,' they gleefully celebrated the final House vote of 219-215, with no Republicans voting for the federal takeover and bludgeoning of the American voting process.

"Because not a single reporter likely bothered to read the 'new' House Resolution 4, introduced only days before it was rushed through the House, the fake news loudly echoed Democrats' false claims that this is a voting rights bill. Nope. It isn't.

"Instead, the bill cynically adopts into federal law every losing argument advanced by the vast leftwing elections industry to courts across the country for years. Every theory rejected by the courts has been enshrined in HR 4. The bill also hands control of our elections over to the radical leftwing attorneys in the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice. ...

"HR 4 indeed is transformative: it eradicates the precious American principle of free and fair elections, imposing a permanent ruling class of tyrannical left-wing elites, forever beyond the reach of the American voters. Stopping HR 4 in the Senate becomes the existential effort of our time. Get out the prayer beads."

Read the entire article here.

"The Supreme Court has issued an order effectively forcing the Biden administration to restore the Trump administration's 'Remain in Mexico' policy, which requires many asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while they await hearings on their requests for safe haven in the U.S.

"The high court's order, issued on Tuesday evening over the dissent of the court's three Democratic appointees, rejected the Justice Department's request for a stay that would have allowed the controversial policy to remain on ice while litigation over President Joe Biden's effort to rescind it continues.

"The ruling is a victory for the states of Texas and Missouri, which sued over the repeal of the policy and won a ruling from a federal judge in Texas earlier this month requiring that the Biden administration return to the practice President Donald Trump instituted in January 2019."

"Imagine: a Rasmussen survey finds only 39% of likely U.S. voters think Biden is doing the job of president, while a majority (51%) say others are actually running the country, making decisions for Biden behind the scenes.

"Never before has the public concluded that the United States president is a puppet; it is a shocking suggestion.

"Such is the damage done by the calamity of Kabul. When the New York Times edges toward calling the president a liar, reporting that Biden made 'several misleading or false claims about the pullout and evacuation,' you know the landscape has shifted."

"Although we don't have much data on the effectiveness of masks on children under 12, we have tons of data on the effectiveness of vaccines on adults. And the science says they are highly effective.

"So, why don't these schools forcing children under 12 to wear masks also force teachers to get vaccinated? Why isn't Biden calling school superintendents and asking them to mandate vaccines for teachers?

"The answer is politics. The teachers unions oppose vaccine mandates for teachers, and so, schools are wary to impose them. That's why Biden is silent on the issue. He doesn't have permission from his political masters to raise this issue. That's just how scientific his approach is.

"There are no easy answers on what policies governments should adopt to deal with COVID. Lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates all come with trade-offs. In a country as big as the United States, it makes sense to let states and localities set policies that fit their communities and their values. What won't help anyone is for Biden to keep using COVID as a distraction from his disastrous handling of Afghanistan and a chance to score cheap political points against his potential 2024 rivals."

"With tens of thousands of Americans and allied Afghans still stranded in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden is facing a ferocious foreign-policy crisis. Or is he?

"'Facing' doesn't seem the right word. Biden's barely been seen since the Taliban began its march to Kabul, taking city after city before seizing the capital. Following four days of silence, the prez finally interrupted his Camp David vacation to address the nation Monday -- and promptly returned to Maryland.

"White House records show he's talked to just two foreign leaders in the last 10 days, Britain's Boris Johnson (it took him 36 hours to return the call!) and Germany's Angela Merkel. There's next to nothing on his schedule, yet he hasn't taken questions from the press all week, with the exception of a sit-down with a former Democratic operative. Even then, Biden bristled when ABC News' George Stephanopoulos stated the obvious: The Afghan withdrawal has been a debacle. ...

"Biden promised to bring America back. Instead, he's in hiding, fibbing or making little sense -- and at a time when he's needed most."

"After 20 years of effort, trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars spent and thousands of American servicemembers killed and wounded, it is important to do a post-mortem on our role in a country that deserves the moniker 'Graveyard of Empires.' One lesson that emerges is that the United States military has forgotten its mission to fight and win our nation's wars.

"'Who lost Afghanistan?' will be an interesting academic debate, but there are other questions that require immediate answers. How did we fight a 20-year war defending a country and end up with that country collapsing during our withdrawal? It defies logic. ...

"In war, momentum on the battlefield has a quality all its own. The Taliban have it. What we need to ask is, how did this end state happen and what lesson should we learn? In the end, it was a question of will. We wanted our efforts to succeed more than the Ghani government did. Prior administrations and their military advisers wanted Afghans to begin acting like Jeffersonian democrats. That seldom works and comes at a high cost. Each nation is unique, be it Iraq or Afghanistan. Our senior leaders, especially our generals, forgot this.

"The final lesson: in a war, any war, fight to win or don't sacrifice our treasure, whether our wealth or our most precious asset -- our sons and daughters. Many of our leaders, military and civilian, forgot that lesson, and that is why we are where we are today."

Read the entire article here.

"For Joe Biden, bad is quickly turning to worse.

"A day after the president tried to defend his decision to wave the white flag in Afghanistan and assure a jittery America his government could manage the fallout, the scope of the disaster came into sharper focus.

"An outbreak of the blame game is erupting among federal agencies trying to duck responsibility. Intelligence and defense officials are leaking that they warned the White House that withdrawing all American forces could lead to the sudden collapse of the Afghan military, but were ignored.

"Perhaps most worrisome for a Democrat in the White House is that the usual media handmaidens are aggressively poking holes in Biden's preposterous assurances instead of defending him."

"President Biden arrived in office with the southern border secure and Afghanistan in a state of fragile equilibrium.

"Eight months later, the border continues to be deluged with migrants overwhelming our capacity to properly house and process them, and we are evacuating our personnel from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, overrun by desperate Afghans fleeing the Taliban.

"The crisis at the border and the stunningly swift defeat in Afghanistan are entirely on Biden. He took sustainable situations and overturned them out of ideological fixity and fantastical wishful thinking.

"The outcomes were utterly predictable. Indeed, anyone who knew anything about the border or Afghanistan warned what would happen.

"The debacles haven't been the product of forces beyond Biden's control; events didn't take a hand, he did. These are man-made disasters."

"There's plenty of blame to go around for the 2-year debacle in Afghanistan -- enough to fill a library of books. Perhaps the effort to rebuild the country was doomed from the start. But our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, staked their lives on us, is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided. The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency -- and and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden."