Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast today is Tuesday September 14th, 2021.

I'm going to apologize for the lateness with which we are dropping this podcast on avoidable scheduling calamities made it necessary for us to do it several hours later than we ordinarily do.

So for those of you who wait and wait in agony for us to drop the podcast in the morning we apologize.

I speak of course not only for myself but for my colleagues executive editor, a Greenwald Hyde, senior writer Christine Rosen, Hyde Christine and associate editor Noah Rothman, hi Noah.

Noah, I gather you've been watching and paying attention to and trying to follow the testimony of Secretary of State Tony Blinken who is now talking to congressional oversight committees about our policy in Afghanistan among other things.

Can you give us a progress report on Blinken and the hot seat?

If he gets a letter grade I guess it's like a C-.

There's I mean it's sort of hard to follow all the dissembling that's going on from this guy because it's been quite a bit.

He was treated to a real you know sort of perfunctory apple polishing treatment from democratic members of the house when he testified yesterday.

He was a far more hostile reception today from the Senate with the exception of some perfunctory indignation from Democrats.

So you know there's a lot of blame to go around here.

That's a portion blame to ever all of us. We all sort of own this failure.

But Anthony Blinken has said a couple of things yesterday that I thought deserved more scrutiny and more attention than they received. The first under questioning from representative Brad Sherman of California who leadingly sort of guided Tony Blinken towards blaming the Trump administration for the spectacular success that they've overseen.

There's the last couple of days sort of a bizarre dichotomy there where you have to find somebody to blame for the success that they're crawling over.

And Anthony Blinken said you know we inherited a deadline. We did not inherit a plan.

Meaning that they didn't have a plan for withdrawal. That is neither credible nor expulpatory.

But first they didn't inherit a plan. Wasn't a very good one. The Trump administration barreled towards withdrawal with with a with a lack of that suggests they would have continued to execute something along the lines of which you'll buy and execute it if they had been reelected.

So they don't deserve any exculpation either. But the Biden administration renegotiated that deadline had its own plan set in place.

According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, it was in conflict. The Pentagon and the State Department were in conflict over it. They stuck to it even as it became blindingly obvious that it would lead to a historic disaster.

Only in the final weeks of July, they start to reconsider some of the aspects of this plan that most disastrously the decision to pull air intelligence and logistical support from the Afghan National Army. But then it was far too late.

But perhaps the worst possible aspect of what's coming out of Secretary of State Blinken in testimony before Congress is in an opening statement that he repeated both before the House of Representatives members of the House representatives and members of the Senate today, which is his third point, which is that they're focused on counterterrorism in central Asia.

And to that effect, the Taliban have become our invaluable partners. Quote, the Taliban has committed to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghanistan as a base for external operations that could threaten the United States or our allies, including Al Qaeda and ISIS.

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