Outside the Beltway

Where religious zealotry can lead. (So, yes, a digression into American politics).

The best statement on the complexity of the Israel-Hamas conflict that I have heard/read.

The trial judge had a conflict of interest.

The anti-McCarthy holdouts have no end game.

The collaboration has been even more robust than advertised.

A precision drone strike on a balcony in Kabul took out a longtime nemesis.

The nature of American political reporting distorts our perception of reality.

An interesting statement from his National Security Advisor.

It’s hard to see how this crisis ends.

Two unclassified after-action reports shine a new—if one-sided—light on the evacuation.

There are no good options, only bad and worse ones.

Children are starving and it’s partly our fault.

A depressing magazine piece argues it is.

Their case is less than persuasive.

President Biden was advised to keep troops in Afghanistan . . . for no apparent reason.

The wonders of hindsight.

The notion of a kinder, gentler version has quickly been debunked.

Humanitarian instincts rightly trumped security concerns.

After 20 years, the conflict closes much as it began.

I guess you proved your point about great powers picking and choosing their battlefields.

Thirteen Marines and dozens of Afghan civilians are dead in a much-anticipated attack.

Grandstanding in the midst of chaos is a bad look.

The evacuation could soon become a terrorist target.

They’ve got a lot of gall blaming Biden for this mess.

We’re not getting Afghans—or even American citizens trapped there—out fast enough.

A humanitarian crisis made worse by shameful delays.

The collapse is not his doing. But he’s accountable for the poor planning.

The mirage of semi-order faded quickly.

The postmortems are well underway.

The collapse is coming even faster than feared.

Our last-ditch airstrikes only postpone the inevitable.

A shameful exit from an ill-conceived war.

For years, American troops fought a ‘forever war’ to delay the inevitable. It’s now coming.

He was both the youngest and oldest man to run the Pentagon.

Yes, it’s complicated, but it is also time to stop relying on cliches.

President Biden has a second chance to do the right thing.

Four administrations and two decades later, it’s about to be over.

There’s more than enough opinion journalism.

How about crowd sourcing a timeline for all of Trump’s enablers?

The President didn’t want to hear about bad behavior from Moscow, so he wasn’t told.

The President should have known about the plot. There’s a good chance he didn’t.

As scary as the Cold War was, it did reduce the silliness in American politics.

The Administration has done nothing about intelligence reports of a grave escalation from Moscow.

How to translate understandable frustration at injustice into tangible reform?

As if the country needed more turmoil.

It’s not clear what has been achieved.

A new report details the extent to which the eighteen-year Afghanistan War has been marked by mistakes, and lies by the government to cover-up the fact that we went to war without a clear understanding of what we were doing.

Eighteen years after it started, the American public seems to be mostly ignoring the war in Afghanistan. But that isn’t an excuse for not bringing it to an end.

Well that didn’t take long.

President Trump has named his fourth National Security Adviser in less than three years.