To take the most notorious example, the agreement expressly states that the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” will not allow jihadist “groups, including al-Qa’ida, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” As the State Department and our $50 billion per annum intelligence apparatus well knew when this agreement was signed, al-Qaeda had all along been aligned with the Taliban and had continued fighting the U.S.-backed regime in conjunction with them. Al-Qaeda’s pre–9/11 partnership with the Taliban had never been broken, even as the terror network persisted, unabashedly, in calling for terrorist operations against American forces, American interests, and the American homeland.

The notion that President Trump would have voided the agreement if the Taliban violated their conditions is sheer nonsense. The conditions were not just made to be broken; they were consciously illusory from the start.

Behind the scenes, of course, publicly stoic senior officials were pleading with Trump not to pull out. But the president was undermining this effort at every turn — repeatedly telling the world he could not get out of the “forever war” fast enough, while his advisers tried to insist that the exit would be conditional on Taliban compliance. In fact, in April, Trump publicly derided Biden for extending the May 1 deadline his agreement had set for full evacuation — because leaving Afghanistan would be “a wonderful and positive thing to do” despite the deteriorating security situation and, critically, the lack of credible U.S. counterterrorism capabilities.