Is it a total bummer that the Taliban are soon going to take over most, if not all of Afghanistan?

Sure it is.

But here’s the thing: it’s their country. The Taliban are Afghanis. It’s their own civil war.

I grieve, like everybody else, for the young women who won’t get an education now, the interpreters who cooperated with the Americans who will be hunted down now, the intellectuals who will be silenced now.

But this is a country that no one can control. The Soviet Union was there for nine years, and they couldn’t get the country under control. We’ve been there for 19 years. How much longer are we supposed to stay?

The place is never going to be “safe” from the Taliban. We can’t protect them forever, so they will have to protect themselves.

This is one are where, remarkably enough, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump essentially agree.