While Panetta addressed our defrocked troops, the savages were up to their usual grisly business. Tim Lynch, a retired Marine now embedded in Afghanistan, summed it up well in an e-mail to journalist Michael Yon: “The Taliban killed 13 women and children today with an IED in Uruzgan and I think they got 8 yesterday — but that’s all cool here because they’re the Taliban and we’re the big, fat, retarded kid on the block who gets bullied everyday but still shows up to fork over even more lunch money while assuming at some point everyone will like us because we’re so [deleted] generous.”

Toward what end are we putting our best young people through this agony? On Capitol Hill, hawks such as Representative Buck McKeon (R., Calif.) insist that we need to see the war through because “the reason we liberated Afghanistan in 2001 was right then, and it is the same reason we fight today to keep it liberated.”

Ridiculous. We did not send our troops to liberate Afghanistan. We sent them to rout al-Qaeda, which they did with spectacular speed and effectiveness. There is nothing in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) about liberating anyone. The American people would never have supported such a thankless, implausible mission.

In point of fact, President Bush was fully prepared to leave the Taliban in place as the Afghan regime if they had agreed to his demand that they surrender bin Laden and his confederates. The Taliban was toppled not because they were tyrannizing their people, but because they spurned us. There was no fervor in post-9/11 America to build a new Afghanistan. In the main, the Afghans are Muslims in the thrall of Wahhabism, the fundamentalist Islam of Saudi Arabia. As such, they cannot be liberated — they have chosen their own tyranny.