Answers, please

As the news shifts, many Americans may think the Afghan war is over. Not so. The searing scenes of Kabul’s fall are having a powerful impact on America’s global image, including the abandonment of Afghan allies.

Chinese and Russian propaganda outlets are gleefully trumpeting scenes of America’s “defeat.” NATO allies who had troops in Afghanistan are bitter that they were forced to leave Afghan staff and their own nationals—because President Joe Biden didn’t consult them.

And the final U.S. defeat—set in motion by former President Donald Trump’s surrender treaty with the Taliban and finalized by Biden’s exit—raises questions about whom and what our country is willing to fight for.

The Biden team needs to look far deeper than the defensive justifications that the president and top officials have been presenting in public. Here are some of the questions.

■ Why was the exit from Kabul so disastrous?

Whether or not you think Biden should have pulled out U.S. troops, this question must be dissected. White House efforts to spin the U.S. military’s herculean last-minute efforts cannot obscure the fact of Taliban victory.

(And GOP hysteria over the chaotic exit is totally hypocritical given Trump’s aborted efforts to schedule sudden pullouts before leaving office and his disastrous U.S. pullout from the Syrian border with Turkey.)

How could U.S. intelligence have failed so badly when the string of Taliban victories after Biden’s withdrawal announcement in mid-April was so unrelenting? Was this a case of White House willful blindness (like George W. Bush in Iraq), or of bureaucratic blundering?

Washington trained an army to U.S. standards, including an air force that needed U.S. maintenance. U.S. military officials warned repeatedly that the Afghan air force—critical to support its ground troops—would collapse if Washington pulled all troops out.

Surely the State Department and the National Security Council knew these facts, yet the White House was caught flat-footed by the Taliban as we exited. Why?

■ What are Americans now prepared to fight for?

“This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” Biden told Americans last week. Fair enough. Clearly, nation-building, and democracy-building, haven’t gone well in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

But has the White House faced the consequences of that admission? The president champions democratic values in contrast to the authoritarianism of China and Russia. How does this square with abandoning the Afghan women activists, journalists and human rights workers who adopted those values?

■ Where and when will America be willing to use military force in the future?

Any “over-the-horizon” efforts to prevent the Taliban from hosting terrorist groups aren’t likely to be successful: We now have no U.S. or Afghan eyes on the ground, and the nearest U.S. bases are many hours away.

For moral and geopolitical reasons, the White House needs to demonstrate that it won’t abandon American citizens and allies in Afghanistan. They are now virtual hostages, and the Taliban will demand economic prizes. But who trusts an ally who leaves its friends and citizens behind?

The White House also needs to remove its blinders and squarely face the causes and consequences of the Kabul debacle. Only then can it begin to convince the world that this was not one more step toward America’s inevitable decline.