With the ongoing collapse of Afghanistan and the slow realization by folks around the country of its implications for America’s place in the world, here are a few items which might inform and enlighten.

First, this morning I was on the radio with Dan Proft on AM 560 in Chicago, and we talked about the withdrawal and the prospect of this turning into not a Saigon 2.0 but a Tehran 2.0 or worse…

We talked mostly about the logistics of getting Americans out of Afghanistan alive, and our mutual incredulity at just how scandalous a botch this entire affair as been. Proft seems satisfied to write the mess in Afghanistan off as the product of sheer incompetence, which I’m not in a position to fully disagree with – I have been a passionate advocate of the position that Joe Biden and those around him are abject buffoons from the start, and I’ve written a whole series of American Spectator columns on how we’re governed by people who suck.

But the gross incompetence around this nightmare gives me pause. I referenced this, but there’s a segment Tucker Carlson did with Lara Logan on his video podcast this week that everybody needs to see, and she hits on something lots of people have felt. Here it is…

I was hoping we might get into something larger during the segment with Dan Proft this morning, which is the question of how wide the implications of the Afghan debacle could be.

As Logan discusses, we are allowing things to happen – we have been allowing things to happen – which are impossible to allow if you have any desire to win in Afghanistan. Why would you let the Taliban shrink back to Pakistan every winter for 20 years? Why would you fund Pakistan’s military and intelligence apparatus if they continued supporting the people who were killing Americans?

We’ve been funding both sides of a war we’re in. We’ve done that for 20 years. Of course we needed to get out of Afghanistan. The whole thing has been pure insanity from the start.

But what position are we in now?

Well, we flew a rainbow flag over our embassy in Kabul for the entire month of June as the Taliban geared up for this year’s military offensive. A rainbow flag, touting homosexuality in the most backward fundamentalist Muslim country in the whole world. For a month. Then we abandoned Bagram Air Base before getting any of our civilians out. This was done immediately after the intelligence community predicted the rapid dissolution of the Afghan government.

Which looks almost like we provoked the dissolution of the Afghan government while we pulled our troops out and left our own civilians, plus the Afghans who helped us, in the lurch.

Not to mention all of the rest of NATO.

Here’s just a sampling of the headlines currently sitting above the fold at Rantingly right now…

• U.S. Pauses Evacuations From Kabul, No Flights In Last 8 Hours From Afghanistan…
• Biden Will Ditch D.C. Yet Again As Afghanistan Crisis Rages, En Route To Delaware Friday Afternoon…
• Rasmussen: Majority Say Biden Isn’t In Charge, Nor Mentally Capable…
• Biden Warned About Afghanistan Collapse In July Cable…
• State Department Spox Ned Price Hails ‘Unprecedented’ U.S. Rescue Effort In Afghanistan…
• Biden Admin Tells Americans Stranded In Afghanistan To Pay For Their Own Flights Home…
• Pentagon Pressed On Why British Paratroopers Leaving Kabul Airport To Rescue Citizens But Americans Aren’t…
• Report: Biden Administration Kept UK ‘In The Dark’ On Evacuation Plans After Kabul Fell…
• US Still Considering Bombing Military Equipment, Especially Aircraft, Left In Afghanistan…
• Senators “Horrified” To See Black Hawk Helicopters In Taliban Hands…
• Report: Taliban Seizes U.S. Military Biometric Tech; Biden Admin Destroyed Afghan SIV Applicant’s Passports At Embassy…
• Taliban ‘Intensify Search’ For Afghans Who Helped U.S., Have A ‘List Of People’ To ‘Question And Punish’…
• Report: Taliban Going ‘House To House’ In Afghanistan ‘Hanging’ People Who Worked With US…
• Pentagon Won’t Deny U.S. Is Buying Fuel From The Taliban For Afghan Airlift…

To call this disorganized, sloppy, and incompetent is to be truthful, of course, but is it sufficient to stop there?

Because what it’s beginning to look like is that somebody in a position to control our non compos mentis president is deliberately sabotaging American foreign policy and with it American prestige and influence on the world stage.

The same people who are pushing Critical Race Theory, which holds that this is a fundamentally racist and unjust country, are in charge of the government. In charge of Biden.

It’s a Manchurian Candidate type scenario, in other words.

And how bad can it get?

Well, if we’re going eight hours without any flights leaving from the airport in Kabul it’s a pretty good bet we aren’t going to make this deadline of August 31 to get all of our people out.

There are rumors out there that the Taliban’s fighters ringing that airport are taunting our Marines with the severed heads of children they’ve killed, which is a clear provocation aimed at starting a firefight. Why on earth would the Taliban even dream of doing that, you say?

Well, our people on the ground are furious at the British paratroopers who are venturing forth into Kabul to rescue British citizens stranded there and bring them to the airport to be flown out. They’re angry about it because (1) they’re under orders not to do that and (2) the Brits have apparently already gotten into a couple of firefights with Taliban warriors during their travels, meaning it’s a matter of time before the situation goes fully kinetic.

And the problem is one of scale. There are a few hundred or so British citizens in Afghanistan that their paratroopers can extract with some degree of ease. We have 10,000 people to get out. Or more. If this thing becomes a hot battle, we can’t avoid mass casualties among our civilians.

It’s even worse than that. We can’t avoid mass casualties among our troops in such a case.

We have something like five thousand Marines and soldiers on the ground at that airport. What hardware they have with them is in question. For certain they’re unlikely to have tanks or armored vehicles, artillery, attack helicopters or any of the heavy equipment we usually go to war with. Essentially we have guys with rifles.

The Taliban, on the other hand, have all of the military hardware we left behind. Not only will they have 10 times the manpower, they’re going to have more firepower than we will. They could very easily drop a bunch of mortar shells on the only runway that airport has, thus rendering it unusable not just to an evacuation but to fly in reinforcements, and then attack our people.

They’ll have us surrounded, and you’re talking about such close quarters as to make air power coming in from Qatar or a carrier in the Indian Ocean dicey, if not impractical.

This could very easily devolve into a military and humanitarian catastrophe like the modern world has never seen. All it’ll take is the Taliban leadership recognizing the leverage they have over us and they’ll be in a position to threaten us with this very scenario unless we give them…

Think about it. What would we pay to avoid that catastrophe?

And bear in mind, these people will have no fear whatsoever of our non compos mentis President. Trump, they would be terrified of. Not Biden. Particularly when they’ve already begun pulling the tacit support from China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran – three, possibly four, nuclear-armed nations. In other words, if they were to slaughter our civilians and our troops and the Russians and Chinese were to complete the checkmate by threatening us with a hot war were we to retaliate, what would our response be?

Would we even have the ability to mount one?

This stuff sounds insane. But honestly, it’s now plausible. That’s how bad this pullout from Afghanistan is.