Joe Biden's 'America's back' confidence torched as Taliban overrun Kabul

Spiraling political calamity looms for a president who had promised to be a sure-handed steward of US foreign policy.

Just last month President Joe Biden defended his Afghanistan pullout by saying that “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”

The images of Taliban fighters inside the presidential palace in Kabul on Sunday, after a series of provincial capitals fell in rapid succession and the nation’s president fled, showed just how wrong Biden’s prediction has been.

Instead of an American-trained Afghan military staving off Taliban militants for months or longer, the U.S.’s longest war is ending with a hasty evacuation of diplomats from Kabul’s airport. Their sudden departure is