They failed — miserably. The idea that we had to send back thousands of troops to Afghanistan after pulling them out in order to mount a desperate rearguard evacuation should be indictment enough. We had to operate from the Kabul airport because we had given up Bagram Airbase, bugging out in the middle of the night at the beginning of July. We had so many U.S. citizens still in the country because we had bizarrely withdrawn military forces first.

In attempting to explain the inexplicable, General Milley has said they had no idea that the Afghan government would collapse so quickly. So no one at the Pentagon takes into account worst-case scenarios? Besides, if the leaks from intelligence agencies are to be believed, it is not true that Milley and others didn’t know. Is it really true that no one in the Pentagon has access to the same information as Bill Roggio and Thomas Joscelyn who run the Long War Journal at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and have made it clear for months how likely a rapid collapse was? Ignorance is no excuse…

Events in Afghanistan are devastating, and there’s no reversing them. We aren’t going to be able to make up for the losses to our security or for the great price that will be paid by our allies. But there is something to be done about the corrosive sense that when our government makes massive, avoidable errors, no one is ever held to account. It is within the power of Milley and Austin, who have embarrassingly emphasized their powerlessness the last few days, to do their part to restore some semblance of accountability by doing the right thing and resigning forthwith.