Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall podcast.

It's a special edition of the Josh Marshall podcast.

We are recording Monday afternoon, Monday, August the 16th, which is the day after the

follow-cable.

That's, you know, it sounds like kind of a grandiose way to put it, but that is what happened.

As you certainly know, over a period of really less than a week, the Afghan government

and the Afghan National Army, which the U.S. has been creating, training up, funding,

and propping up for really the last 20 years.

It's not quite 20 years, because the U.S. went into Afghanistan, I don't know, the exact

month, but it was maybe December 2001, a couple months after, I don't know, six weeks

after the 9-11 attacks, and that is just a few months shy of 20 years ago.

Like many of you, I remember it, not quite like it was yesterday, but wasn't that long ago,

and yet it was 20 years ago.

This has been happening all of this time, and as we saw the Afghan government, the Afghan

National Army, could not survive first contact with a post-U.S. military reality, and, you

know, these are shocking images that we're seeing.

They are some of them are really iconic images, and many people are seeing this as an example

of the bad decision to pull out, mismanaged decision to pull out.

People have different opinions.

To me, and I've explained this in a number of posts on the site over the last 48 hours.

As messy and as ugly and as painful as it is, you know, painful in different ways for

different people to see this happening, everything that we have seen in the last 36 to 48 hours

...