Welcome back to the Dispatch podcast.

I'm your host, Sarah Isger.

And this week we are going to have a special podcast for you.

This week on Dispatch Live,

Steve Hayes, David French, and Tom Jocelyn,

who writes the newsletter Vital Interest for us,

had a full wide-ranging conversation about Afghanistan,

what's happening on the ground, what we know,

what we don't, where US foreign policy goes from here.

I think you'll find it to be a very interesting conversation.

I'm going to start with you and we're not going to waste any time.

President Biden gave an interview tonight with George Stephanopoulos,

ABC News, in which he said, in effect,

what we've seen transpire over the past week was inevitable.

Nothing could have been done to avoid it.

And contradicting the speech that he gave in April,

when he said this would be an orderly phased withdrawal,

said that they understood that there was going to be chaos,

that there was going to be a mess when we left.

When do you make of those comments?

Well, I mean, the first thing is that President Biden's given three speeches

now since April on his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.

...