Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast for today August 25th, 2020.

John Pajoritz is still out, but with us today is senior writer Christine Rosen,

high Christine. And executive editor, a Greenwald Hyde.

I'm associate editor Noah Rothman and to update you on the status of our

shambolic evacuation from Afghanistan. Things are going from bad to worse as you

could have imagined yesterday. The United States military confirmed that

they're pulling up stakes as we speak. The even though the evacuation is ongoing

and while there have been some 80,000 evacuations individuals have been

removed from Kabul airport among them are a measly 4,000 Americans. Now that's

not nothing, but when your estimate was anywhere between 10 to 15,000 Americans

stranded in the country when Kabul fell, you can do the math. Nevertheless, the

United States military is performing a retrograde action. They're beginning to

move assets out of the country yesterday during a press conference by

press secretary Jen Psaki. She was confronted with the concept of midnight and

was confused. Somebody would ask the press secretary, when the deadline was, is

it August 31st at noon? Is it August 30th at 11.59 p.m.? What is it? And the

rise kind of widened and she stumbled a little bit and said,

you'll have to get back to you. But that she conceded the premise of the

question that evacuation of American military personnel would have to begin

necessarily prior to the 31st deadline whenever that is reached. And we

subsequently got some information out of the Pentagon that they would more, the

more than happy to sacrifice even more equipment, if that means extending this

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