Last Helicopter Out of Kabul

A war that began when I was just 17 years old and has lasted longer than any other US war, just shy of 20 years (more than half my lifetime) is finally over.

Taliban insurgents entered the Afghanistan capital Kabul on Sunday, an interior ministry official said, as the United States evacuated diplomats from its embassy by helicopter...
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...U.S. officials said the diplomats were being ferried to the airport from the embassy in the fortified Wazir Akbar Khan district. More American troops were being sent to help in the evacuations after the Taliban's lightning advances brought the Islamist group to Kabul in a matter of days.

Our generation's Saigon I guess. I remember reading Michael Scheuer's Imperial Hubris back in 2007 or so, some six years after the US invaded Afghanistan and, what appears to be, 13 years before we are finally about to leave. It's been quite the mess before and since. Higher ups forcing troops to ignore Bacha Bazi or the locals who went about selling most of the world's illegal opium or the vast array of other problems that came out in "The Afghanistan Papers" The Washington Post published a few years back. The Taliban is awful, obviously, but it was clear as day back in 2007 (2001 really) that a Pashtun group would rule Afghanistan in the end and the United States would follow the Soviet Union's and Great Britain's example in the "Graveyard of Empires." Scheuer's book's title was certainly apt.

Hopefully we can finally learn that nation building simply doesn't work and is exorbitantly costly in both lives and treasure. And hopefully we can learn that without the Soviet-style collapse.

(I should also note the war was fought to capture/kill Osama Bin Laden who the Taliban offered to turn over. In other words, even the invasion was unnecessary.)