While I disagreed with President Obama’s decision to abandon Iraq in 2011, it was to his immense credit that he had the wisdom to reverse course to stop the ISIS genocide, and it was to President Trump’s credit that he continued the fight Obama started. But then Trump made a deal with Afghanistan’s equivalent of ISIS, and it is President Biden’s mistake to complete the blunder that Trump began.

It is easy to allocate blame for the Afghan collapse. Already the internet is filling with poignant postmortems of our 20-year war abroad. But we know who is not to blame for the Afghan Army’s failures, and it’s the women and girls who face the return of medieval oppression. It’s the men and women who laid down their lives to support American troops in the field. It’s the tiny, beleaguered Christian community in Afghanistan…

There is a responsibility to protect the people of Afghanistan from the evil to come. The government of Afghanistan is failing. We don’t know if a genocide like that committed by ISIS awaits, but we do know we can stop a mass atrocity with a minimal exertion of our vast national might. A moral pillar of our international order is crumbling before our eyes. Never again? It may happen again, and we are choosing to stand aside.