11 September—“Just for the record, we shouldn’t have been in Afghanistan in the first place. That goes back at least four decades, when we sent materiel to the mujahadeen to fight the Soviets and protect the opium trade. And, as an ugly aside, the Taliban are recovering and using the magnificent military materiel we’re abandoning as our troops flee ignominiously. They and the Afghans who have depended on us deserve much better.”

That’s the last paragraph of my 22 August post. When I wrote it, I had no idea of the incredible magnitude of the materiel the United States was abandoning. Having spent—make that wasted—almost 900 billion dollars in Afghanistan since 2001, the geniuses in the Pentagon are leaving behind several billion worth of everything from bottled water, energy drinks, and MREs (meals ready-to-eat) to civilian vehicles to MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles).

Not to mention countless helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, Humvees, firearms and other ordnance, and . . . the catalogue of abandoned materiel is just too sickening to consider.

The Pentagon insists that many of the land and air vehicles and lots of the ordnance has been rendered unusable and that the Taliban don’t have the smarts to repair, operate, or deploy most of their booty anyway. Yeah, right. That’s the same Pentagon that promised an “orderly and safe” departure from Afghanistan. And the Taliban’s evil allies are bound to come to its aid at the drop of a hat.

Even given the antecedent condition of gratuitous American presence in corruption-riddled Afghanistan, did our exit have to be so poorly planned and executed, embarrassing, and dishonorable? And, not even considering that we effectively surrendered valuable materiel to our enemy, couldn’t the Pentagon—and the feckless Trump and Biden administrations—have planned ahead for the “orderly and safe” redeployment of materiel and rescue of human beings?