But it’s not only Afghans for whom the Biden administration has shown a lack of empathy. It’s also America’s veterans. It shouldn’t fall to our service members to clean up the mess made by this catastrophic withdrawal. And yet it has. For years, veterans have been calling for the issuing of long-promised visas for Afghan allies to be sped up. The calls only grew louder after Mr. Biden announced his withdrawal plan. In April, a chorus of veterans’ groups pleaded with the White House to begin a mass evacuation of Afghans. A bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to the White House in June asking why the Pentagon had not been mobilized to protect Afghan allies, warning “the time is now.”

And yet Mr. Biden went ahead, over the pleas and against the advice of so many. The warnings came true. And because the administration provided no meaningful method for Afghans to leave, aside from a sclerotic special-visa application process, it has fallen to veterans and other civilians to try to save those who are desperately appealing for our help. Most of us, I believe, have done it out of a sense of duty and moral obligation, and as a last-ditch effort to uphold the promises we made to our Afghan friends. While there have been some success stories in this “digital Dunkirk,” as the former C.I.A. analyst Matt Zeller called it, there have been far more failures, near misses and desperate hopes dashed after hours and days of waiting in fear.