What is left of America (and its experts) in the Taliban era?

Why is it that a superpower so rich in experts, scholars, pundits and policymakers keeps messing up in the Greater Middle East?

Even by the usual American standards, the collapse of the US-built and generously sponsored Afghan army in the face of the Taliban’s walkover victory into Kabul is a fiasco of mega proportions. The habitual post-mortem (who “lost” Afghanistan, how, and why?) hardly scratches the surface of what actually happened. When a ragtag movement, supposedly crushed into oblivion by the most powerful military alliance on the planet, and bombed and re-bombed to smithereens for over two decades, rises from the ashes, walks into the very presidential palace built by the “terminators” – who were incidentally still around, watching as if in a trance – to manage its terminal absence, it is not Afghanistan we should be discussing here. It should be America itself and what is left of it as a world power. Hitherto, the standard answers being offered included: how the “good war in Afghanistan” (unlike, God forbid, the bad one in Iraq!), turned bad as well; how better logistics and timing could have helped, how strategies could have been different, etc.