EVEN THE BBC IS PITILESS: Three ways this Afghanistan crisis really hurts Biden. “The shambolic unravelling of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan comes from a yet to be written textbook of ‘how to lose at everything’. Warnings hadn’t been heeded, intelligence was clearly totally inadequate, planning was lamentable, execution woeful. . . . The withdrawal came during the ‘fighting season’ — a phrase I have to say I have always found rather odd. But in Afghanistan there is a fighting season which starts in spring — and then in winter, when the country freezes over, there is a time when the Taliban go home to their tribal homelands. Did no-one think that it might have been better to have ordered the withdrawal for the dead of winter when Taliban forces weren’t there, poised to fill the vacuum?”