Biden turns to nation building at home, but the political threats he left behind in Afghanistan could come back to haunt him

President Joe Biden may have ended the "forever war" but the dangerous loose ends he left behind in Afghanistan could still thwart his attempt to throw everything at his top priority domestic goals.

In a quintessential example of an approach that might be termed "Americans First," Biden will pivot from the country's longest war to rebuilding a nation under siege at home from a new Covid-19 assault and severe weather, as more than a million people wilt without power after Hurricane Ida. The President is also eager to get on with selling a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure and social spending proposal that would rebalance the economy toward workers but still faces a complicated path through Congress. But the messy end to the Afghan conflict, the Americans left behind when the US airlift ended and the geopolitical and national security implications of an anarchic failed state teeming with radicals mean that moving on will be far more complicated than declaring the two-decades-long conflict over.