Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger joined by Steve Hayes,

Jonah Goldberg and David French. We will obviously be spending a lot of time talking about

Afghanistan today, both what we know that is happening on the ground and the political

ramifications here at home. We will also talk about COVID, need for a booster shot and

what is happening with hospitals around the country and end with the new census data,

what we know and what we don't.

Let's dive right in. Steve, come to you first.

Well, it's been a week since we last talked about Afghanistan with this group and it's

been a really, really awful week for Afghans and a really, really awful week for the United

States. We've seen the entire country fall to the Taliban, including the capital of Kabul.

There is one region that is up for, that's contested, we'll say, in the middle of the country,

but basically the Taliban control the rest of the country. The US has botched the evacuation

of its own citizens and Afghan allies to a degree that I don't think any of us could

have imagined if we predicted this one week ago today. You now have top US diplomats negotiating

with the Taliban, pleading with the Taliban to allow us to extract our citizens. The Biden

administration can't tell us how many citizens have been abandoned in Afghanistan. The White

House says 11,000 plus, the Pentagon says between 5,000 and 10,000. I think the fact that

they can't give you a ballpark suggests that this is a very dire set of circumstances

and that the Biden administration has been caught totally unprepared. Beyond that on Tuesday,

Jake Sullivan National Security Advisor gave a press briefing at the White House in which

he was asked about the billions of dollars of advanced military equipment that was left

behind in Afghanistan and whether the US knew where it was and whether we had any prospect

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