With regard to Afghanistan, millions of Americans are watching a historic debacle unfolding in real time. They see the hasty and seemingly unfathomable withdrawal of troops by the Biden administration, while thousands of Americans and Afghan loyalists remain stranded behind enemy lines, or stacked up like cord wood at a civilian-controlled Kabul airport increasingly vulnerable to terrorist attacks — even as they learned the military-controlled Bagram Air Base was abandoned in the middle of the night. They know billions of dollars of sophisticated U.S. weaponry, including aircraft, were also left behind and seized by the Taliban. They watch in disgust while a parade of seemingly impotent administration figures, including CIA Director William Burns, plead with terrorists to extend the August 31 withdrawal deadline. And above all else, they watch America’s standing as a superpower virtually evaporate, as Joe Biden has meekly surrendered the most potent military in the world to a ragtag bunch of seventh-century goat herders.

In short, they are appalled by the almost unfathomable level of incompetence demonstrated by this president and his administration. Perhaps they should consider another scenario that elicits a troubling question: What if it’s all by design?

Few people want to believe that. Hoover Institute fellow and human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali asserts that what we’re witnessing is “incompetence taken to cartoonish levels.” Columnist Richard Hernandez sees “the manifest collapse of the Washington intelligence, diplomatic, and military institutions on which national and Western security depend,” courtesy of an administration that “insists on characterizing obvious ineptitude as resolute excellence.”

Historian Victor Davis Hanson also jumps on the incompetence bandwagon, describing America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense as those who have “virtue-signaled their critical race theory credentials,” “bragged about rooting out alleged white supremacists from their ranks,” “sparred with journalists while fighting Twitter wars and issuing cartoonish commercials attesting to their woke credentials,” and “sermonized on anything and everything — except their plans to prevent a humiliating military defeat of U.S. forces and their allies.”

Even one of the debacle’s architects, General Mark Milley of “white rage” fame, insisted an abhorrent level of echo-chamber groupthink that allowed for no alternative scenarios was the culprit. “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days,” he declared.

President Joe Biden himself? “Some of Biden’s most senior appointees are contradicting him in public,” Fox New host Tucker Carlson explains. “If you cover politics, it’s shocking to see that. This is a violation of the first and most ruthlessly enforced rule in any White House: Don’t diminish the boss. But suddenly they’re doing just that, and they’re doing it openly.”

Such an assertion provokes images of proverbial rats getting ready to leave a sinking ship in the mad rush to preserve what little personal credibility they have left. All well and good except for one thing — no one’s left, and no one’s been fired.

Moreover, Afghanistan is not the only “debacle” being orchestrated by this administration. While that tragedy unfolds, more than one million illegals, many of whom are infected with COVID, have already streamed across what has become a nonexistent southwest border and been dispersed throughout the nation, with all forethought and malice fully intended. Unvetted Afghan refugees are also being flown into America, while American citizens are left behind. Biden has made the nation energy-dependent again, while going hat in hand to OPEC nations and begging them to increase oil production. A Democrat-controlled Congress, led by Nancy Pelosi, remains determined to pass multitrillion-dollar “infrastructure” and “relief” bills that will further exacerbate already rampant inflation and debase the value of the nation’s currency. And all of this is occurring in the midst of a pandemic that has precipitated the most lethal and well-coordinated fear camping in the nation’s history, producing spasms of totalitarianism, the bastardization of our 2020 election process, and crystal clear indications that our ruling class brazenly holds itself to a different set of standards than the rest of us.

One debacle is an anomaly. A series of them is a pattern.

“So now we’re all talking about the corruption and the ‘this’ and the ‘that’ and that there’s all these complex parts,” investigative reporter Lara Logan asserts, “but at its heart, every single thing in the world, in your personal life, professionally, on the global stage, at its heart, it’s very simple. It always comes down to one thing, one or two things. And in this case, in Afghanistan, this comes down to the fact that the United States wants this outcome.”

Logan also cuts through the incompetence excuse like a laser: “The staggering part to me is that when you hear this debate, ‘The intelligence agencies failed to see this.’ Seriously? The NSA is known as the crown jewel of intelligence collection in the world. There isn’t a digital signature in existence that they don’t collect and store and analyze and have algorithms and everything else to sort through.”

Columnist Kelly O'Connell also sees the bigger picture. “It’s easy to see that all of these crazy ‘mistakes’ could never have happened by accident,” she writes, adding that “Biden was used as an absolute remote-controlled clown to ruin our reputation at home and abroad so that we will eventually be forced into World utopian socialism.”

Are they right? Last year, this columnist outlined the ambitions of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its CEO, German octogenarian Klaus Schwab. Using the pandemic as his rationale, Schwab insisted: “The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.”

Moreover, in a video outlining the WEF’s eight predictions for 2030 — every one of which revolved around the top-down centralization of power — one statement stood out above all the rest: “The United States won’t be the world’s leading superpower. A handful of countries will dominate.”

Again, as of this writing, no one responsible for any of these ongoing calamities has quit or been fired. Nor have there been any attempts to even mitigate the aforementioned crises. Thus, we will leave Afghanistan in ignominy, the number of illegals streaming across the border will continue to soar, inflation will continue eviscerating our middle class, and progressives at every level of government will continue to test Americans’ willingness to accommodate tyranny in exchange for safety. All while America’s world reputation sinks like a stone.

“Who could imagine any American president allowing murderous thugs to set the terms of our military’s surrender?” asks columnist Michael Goodwin. Anyone who understands what happens when you put people who hate this nation in charge of it.

Incompetence? Anything but.