Saigon in the sand?

It was shades of South Vietnam, circa 1975, in Afghanistan this weekend as Taliban militants seized control of the presidential palace in Kabul after former President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. Approximately 6,000 U.S. troops were ordered back to Afghanistan in an attempt to quell the tumult following the shockingly rapid fall of the capital city. Meanwhile, the U.S. completed the evacuation of its embassy on Saturday and took down the American flag at the diplomatic compound.

• — A skeleton crew in a makeshift embassy. U.S. State Department personnel have temporarily relocated to the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, under U.S. military protection. Most are prepared to depart the country. U.S. efforts to evacuate Americans, local staff, special immigrant visa applicants, and others are ongoing.
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• — A chaotic scene at the airport. Per the White House, President Biden has been briefed by his national security team, including Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley, on the security situation at the Kabul airport, where thousands of Afghans rushed to flee the Taliban. Amid the chaos, seven people have died.
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• — Where does Biden stand on all of this? "I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats," Biden said on Saturday, blaming his predecessor in part for the U.S. deal with the Taliban that was bequeathed to him. "I would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth." Biden will address the American people on the matter today at 3:45pm ET. —USA Today

Brill: Many lessons to be learned in Afghanistan

"There is nothing to be gained from finger-pointing. Afghanistan is clearly a bipartisan failure. Presidents of both parties made mistakes there, and majorities from both parties in Congress either supported those mistakes or enabled them. ... America did not win and neither did the Afghan people. We owe it to future generations of American soldiers and taxpayers to study our experience in Afghanistan and identify lessons and principles that will help future policymakers and military leaders recall the past and learn from it, rather than being doomed to fail once again. The president and the Congress must act together in a bipartisan way to start this learning process—and soon." —Kenneth Brill in The Hill

Kenneth Brill is a retired career Foreign Service Officer who served as an ambassador in the Clinton and Bush Administrations and was the founding Director of the U.S. National Counterproliferation Center within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

MORE: The U.S. spent $83 billion training Afghan forces. Why did they collapse so quickly? —Defense One

Texas mask showdown

The Texas Supreme Court has temporarily blocked local mask mandates, siding with Gov. Greg Abbott, who in July barred government entities in the state—including school districts—from instituting mask requirements. As COVID-19 cases have risen dramatically amid the Delta variant, some school districts have pushed back. "Gov. Abbott's order does not limit the district's rights as an employer and educational institution to establish reasonable and necessary safety rules for its staff and students," officials at the Dallas Independent School District, the state's largest, said in a statement. The decision awaits a final ruling by the state Supreme Court, following hearings for the Dallas ISD and the San Antonio Independent School District. Stay tuned. —U.S. News & World Report

MORE: Record number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 —The Hill

Sargent: The Census data is here. Now comes the gerrymandering

"The release of new Census data will set off a scramble of state legislatures redrawing congressional and state legislative district lines, setting the political playing field for 2022. It has been widely established that Republicans can recapture the House on the strength of extreme gerrymanders alone. They need to net five seats, and those could be added based solely on redrawn district lines. Indeed, Samuel Wang, the director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, has concluded that if Republicans successfully gerrymander, they can win the House if the 2022 national popular vote rivals the 2020 Democratic edge of three points." —Greg Sargent in The Washington Post

Greg Sargent is a columnist at The Washington Post and the author of "An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics."

MORE: Census: U.S. sees unprecedented multiracial growth, decline in the white population for first time in history —USA Today

Snap election in the Great White North

Betting that his political standing has been improved by his response to the coronavirus pandemic, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has called for a snap federal election on Sept. 20 in a bid to regain a majority in Canada's House of Commons. Trudeau has led with a minority government since October 2019. Winning a majority would mean he wouldn't need to rely on opposition parties to advance his agenda. Opposition party leaders have decried as "selfish" the decision to hold an election when Canada, like the U.S., is in a Delta-fueled fourth pandemic wave. "Canadians need to choose how we finish the fight against COVID-19 and build back better, from getting the job done on vaccines to having people's backs all the way to and through the end of this crisis," Trudeau countered. —The Washington Post

MORE: Beijing shoves Canada's China problem into the path of Trudeau's re-election quest —Politico

Focus on domestic extremism

The Department of Homeland Security is considering hiring private companies to analyze public social media for warning signs of extremist violence, spurring debate within the agency over how to monitor for such threats while protecting Americans' civil liberties. The effort, which remains under discussion and hasn't received approval or funding, would involve sifting through large flows of internet traffic to help provide leads on developing attacks, whether from home or abroad.

• — Prompted by the insurrection. The initiative comes after the nation's intelligence community failed to sufficiently identify and share signs of the threats that led to the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. John Cohen, a top DHS official, is spearheading the project, which would marshal the expertise of outside companies while ramping up the agency's internal capabilities.
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• — Cohen's push has sparked debates. At DHS and elsewhere in the administration, there are longstanding tensions between civil liberties and security efforts. The basis of DHS's legal authority for the proposed effort remains murky as well—though the government currently tracks broad swaths of publicly available information, it faces constraints on what it can gather from social media.
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• — Civil liberties advocates have concerns. They worry that the resulting data—even received anonymized from private companies—could lead to government overreach. In intelligence reports, DHS has previously identified as suspicious such views as "opposition to gun control and immigration, anger about the 2020 election results or the use of force by police, or a belief in certain conspiracy theories," said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, deputy director for the Brennan Center's national security program. "There's a real temptation, once the tool is in place…to say, 'Well, we have this, why don't we use it for these other purposes?'" —The Wall Street Journal

Brooks: Competence and democracy go hand in hand

"If we want to rescue the concept of competence from the critiques of both right and left, we need to understand it in its broadest sense, rather than its narrowest. To be worth anything in a democracy, the idea of competence also needs to encompass judgment, humility, and empathy. ... If we give up entirely on the idea of developing a broad and shared understanding of competence or on the idea that competence matters, we might as well give up on the democratic project itself." —Rosa Brooks in The New York Times

Rosa Brooks is a professor at Georgetown's law school and the author of "Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City."

MORE: Democracy across the world is in crisis. Biden's summit is needed —The New York Times

In Ben Fields' piece that The Topline shared last week, he wrote that "the work of scientists, public health officials, and healthcare workers has been astonishing, while the handiwork of politicians has been baffling." I couldn't possibly agree more with that statement—especially the last part.

Allow me to paint you a picture: the other night, my seven-year-old son was playing with a friend, and she accidentally slammed a door on his hand, breaking his fingers and fingernails and lacerating his hand severely. We packed him up and rushed him to the local ER, hoping that doctors would see him immediately—but when we got there, it was a Covid wasteland: the halls were filled with people coughing, hacking, and vomiting...people who clearly had Covid and were waiting to be seen.

My son had to sit in the ER waiting room, with a towel soaked in his own blood over his hand—and in excruciating pain—for THREE HOURS before he could even be seen by a doctor. And all because every ER in our region was packed full of people who didn't take Covid seriously and are now in the throes of it.

I live in Southeastern Washington, in a very conservative part of an otherwise liberal state. I have watched my hard-line Republican friends rail against the vaccine, and against mask mandates set forth by Gov. Inslee, and all in the name of "freedom" and "their rights" and "not allowing the government to control them." I get it (to an extent), but at what point does people's humanity kick in? At what point do we finally stop treating this virus like a political football and realize that we're all in this battle together?

It was heart-wrenching watching my son suffer for hours because people are too proud (or too brainwashed) to use common sense and get the vaccine. If you're reading this and haven't gotten it yet, I plead with you to do so—if for no other reason than to prevent what happened to my son from happening to another innocent child. —Derek M., Washington

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