In Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, the editors offered this in describing President Joe Biden (D) and his administration as the Taliban’s hostage:

Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admitted they lack the military resources and political mandate to ensure that every American is evacuated amid the Taliban control of Kabul.

The key part here, assuming Austin and Milley are on the up and up (which I have no reason to believe, given their emphasis on the wokeness of our military over its combat effectiveness), is the political mandate. If Biden were a serious actor in this tragedy, the political mandate would be loudly extant, with the direct result of the military resources being promptly available.

There are some 10,000-15,000 Americans out in the Afghan sticks. How are these supposed to make their own way to the airport, Biden and his State Department having written them off as needing to fend for themselves?

There are lots of airfields scattered around the countryside that those military resources could be used to retake for the purpose of staging military transport to go get those Americans and ferry them to Kabul.

That would be difficult to do this late in the Biden Retrograde, but eminently possible.