Biden's disastrous decision gets worse and worse

As the casualty toll rises every hour - now nearly 200 - after the suicide bombing at Kabul airport, it must be difficult for Joe Biden to sleep at night. Every time he goes to the microphone he sounds older and more croaky. The way democracy works is that the president of the United States and commander-in-chief gets advice from everyone he needs to get advice from and then makes the big decision. But in this case Biden had already made up his mind to get all US troops out of Afghanistan by midnight August 31 and no later whatever the situation on the ground. So when every single military commander and the defence secretary advised him to keep a troop presence in Kabul as a deterrent to the Taliban he listened but his ears were effectively blocked. He never thought it was a good idea to have so many troops in Afghanistan - 100,000 at the peak period - and decided that Trump was right and it was time to end the "forever" war. So he rejected the advice of all his military advisers and went for the troops-out deadline. That decision has now shown to have been cataclysmic. The bad guys took advantage of the decision and exploited it to the full. First, the Taliban, and now Isis. One former senior Pentagon official put it like this to me: "This is the sloppiest execution of a major policy decision I have ever seen in my caree." I agree.