You saw the pictures.
\nThe swarm of humanity, jostled against fences at Hamid Karzai International Airport.
\nAbbey Gate. That\u2019s where the Americans were. Then th \u2026<\/b>
\nYou saw the pictures. The swarm of humanity, jostled against fences at Hamid Karzai International Airport. Abbey Gate. That\u2019s where the Americans were. Then the Taliban shut off access to Abbey Gate. Then the suicide bomber came. You could anticipate a flurry behind the walls of the Pentagon. The CIA in Langley, VA. The State Department in Foggy Bottom. The West Wing. On Capitol Hill. Afghanistan consumed official Washington. This was all part of a dance that unfolds on the global stage. A crisis erupts far outside the Beltway \u2013 often in a place that\u2019s 180 degrees different from Washington, DC. Yet when things turned for the worse in Kabul, things turned for the worse in Washington, too. The U.S. withdrew its forces from Afghanistan. But Afghanistan will continue to rent space in Washington for a long time. Afghanistan was „bad“ \u2013 in that sort of Washington way. Anyone in DC will always tell you it\u2019s better for a foreign policy crisis to emerge when Congress is out of session. There just aren\u2019t hundreds of reporters trolling about Capitol Hill, sticking cameras and tape recorders into the faces of members of Congress for their comments. The Senate has been out of session for weeks. Senators started their „August recess“ late, toiling on a budget framework for the Democrats\u2019 $3.5 trillion social spending bill and the bipartisan infrastructure package. As fate would have it, House Democratic leaders recalled lawmakers in late August to wrestle with the budget resolution for the big spending plan \u2013 just as Afghanistan devolved. The Democratic brass struggled for a day to engineer an accord with moderate Democrats, The Democratic discord threatening to imperil President Biden\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n