By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Elbridge Colby is leading a conservative effort to prepare Americans for a military conflict in Taiwan.

The images from Afghanistan circulating in Washington this week have been of collapse and evacuation: the interior of a military cargo plane, filled with more than six hundred Afghan evacuees sitting on the floor and grasping straps; a little girl with a pink backpack being handed over a wall, with hopes of escaping; hundreds of Afghans chasing a departing cargo plane on the runway at Hamid Karzai International Airport, as if they might grab hold of it and be lifted away. “Please don’t leave us behind,” an Afghan Air Force pilot pleaded, via the news network the Bulwark, speaking on behalf of many who were undeniably being left behind. “We will be great Americans.” In the U.S., some of the deepest lamentations came from people who had poured themselves into this project. “We were overly optimistic and largely made things up as we went along,” Mike Jason, a retired Army colonel who trained Afghan police, wrote in The Atlantic last week. “We didn’t like oversight or tough questions from Washington, and no one really bothered to hold us accountable anyway.” The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, anticipating that the lamentations might grow even deeper and more catastrophic, sent out a suicide-prevention blast: “Veterans may question the meaning of their service or whether it was worth the sacrifices they made. They may feel more moral distress.” These feelings, the V.A. noted, were normal. “You are not alone.”

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