I remember the moment in early 2021 when Biden casually announced we'd be out of Afghanistan by the end of the year. I was stunned. I couldn't believe we hadn't learned any lessons from the Iraq pullout - this was not the clear-minded, responsible foreign policy I'd voted for (and which thankfully has asserted itself in other areas, like Ukraine). Trump had negotiated a virtual fucking surrender with *the Taliban* - and we were going to honor it.

What was worse was that this was being treated as an applause line by my fellow Progressives, and more or less ignored by the "loyal opposition". All year it felt like we were sleepwalking toward a disaster and yet almost nobody seemed all that concerned, save for a few journalists and international affairs experts, half of whom saw this as a necessary evil which we were just going to have to bite the bullet and accept. There were a few members of Congress attempting to prod the administration to start evacuating people to Guam months earlier - an obviously prudent solution that ended up getting ignored until the last moment because of idiotic security fears. All we got from the administration was some ridiculous assurance that they were "expediting" the already glacial process of approving special visas. We shouldn't have even considered leaving until all of those were finished.

I still consider Biden to be a fundamentally good man, but George Packer has it absolutely right when he said that he has a certain "moral blind spot" with regard to the people we leave behind in war zones (the same one he exhibited with regard to Vietnam). What's curious is that he was momentarily pulled to the idealistic side after visiting Afghanistan and talking to a schoolgirl in 2004, but he reverted to form as the Iraq war spiraled toward disaster. Biden views these things like what he is: a military parent who never served himself. He wanted our troops brought home safe at all costs, yet many of the men and women we were supposedly acting on behalf of didn't want it to end that way. They had spent years working in Afghanistan believing in all they had accomplished in Kabul, and felt betrayed that it was being treated like a bothersome burden to be discarded so we could begin the process of memory-holing it all.

There are many authors to this galactic failure of foreign policy. Including people for whom I voted, doing what I wanted them to do when I voted for them at the time. So I can't just point the finger at my political opponents over the years. In particular, many fellow progressives ultimately chose to turn their backs on exactly the kind of people that we're supposed to support. Because nowadays we can't seem to process any moral quandary without first identifying the white, hegemonic power who will play the role of the bad guy. So that was us - the imperialistic occupying power who had to go so that the marginalized Afghan people of the Taliban could be free to start murdering the westernized, relatively liberated culture we spent a generation ruthlessly allowing to flourish in Kabul. That's decolonization for you.

But there is one person I honestly can't ever see myself forgiving over this. And surprise! It isn't Trump. He's too much of an irresponsible doofus to have even been paying attention to what was going on under his nose, courtesy of the one person who makes Trump look comparatively human. The snake who hissed in his ear when he was ready to make a deal to save the DREAMers, reminding him how poorly this act of basic human decency would go down with the deplorable faction of his base - even though they'd be getting much of everything else they wanted, including funding for his previous border wall. The man who ultimately oversaw virtually every aspect of Trump's immigration and refugee policy, and who intentionally stonewalled the processing of special visas for our Afghan allies - ultimately ensuring a backlog that would be impossible to clear as we beat our hasty retreat.

If there's one person I fear being in the White House almost as much as Trump, it's Stephen Miller. I don't normally like using such fatuously puerile terms like "evil" or even "racist" - most of the time they feel like gratuitous schoolyard taunts for grownups. But for people so detestably vile as Stephen Miller, I find that restraint often eludes me. He represents a faction of America that, for all my aspirational talk of national unity, I have no desire to learn to live with and with whom I simply cannot "respectfully disagree". You can bet your ass he would have been fighting that eleventh-hour airlift operation every step of the way if Trump had been in office and had one of his rare flashes of conscience. Maybe he's a convenient villain for me in the humanitarian calamity that was Afghanistan, but a villain nonetheless.