CAPITAL CONNECTIONS

Afghanistan’s capital, at midnight on August 31, President Biden hailed the operation as an “extraordinary success.” At least he thought so. What the media had been showing for a week was an extraordinary debacle: desperate Afghans dropping from American airplanes as they took off; 13 troops and dozens of Afghans killed by Afghanistan’s ISIS affiliate in the crowd outside the airport; mounds of equipment, an estimated 100 American citizens, and who knows how many Afghan allies, left behind. Boomers recalled the fall of Saigon in 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War. But history offers an even more chaotic wartime abandonment of a capital: Washington, DC, falling to the British at the nadir of the War of 1812.