Instead of spreading decency and democracy, the Forever War has tended to bring corruption and suspicion of democracy back home. The American public was overwhelmingly against participating in the Syrian civil war, so much so that it scared Congress away from endorsing that mission. But our intelligence agencies and Department of Defense were there anyway. They helped fund a group that beheaded a child. Some of our allies in Idlib Province issued press releases welcoming the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. They are an offshoot of al-Qaeda; we made them our allies under the legal authority to confront al-Qaeda. The same institutions that vetted the child-beheaders are vetting the Afghan refugees arriving in the United States now.

Having set ourselves the impossible mission of building in Afghanistan a civil society loyal enough to a deeply corrupt central government that the society could somehow repel, by itself, a Taliban that was supported by the largest ethnic group and had a rear operating base in one of our own allied states — one we dared not discipline or reprimand — the top brass of our military became accustomed to lying to the public, to their presidents, and ultimately to themselves. When you look at General Mark A. Milley, you’re looking at the kind of man that the Forever War produces. Afghans have been getting slaughtered in the war under our watch — civilian deaths really began to pick up after 2013. This was not sustainable or just. Biden was put in the position of doing something popular — getting out — or doing something expert, getting deeper into a hopeless, corrupt mess that makes a lot of unsavory people rich.

And so, 20 years later, advocates of putting democracies on every dune and atoll across the globe have come full circle to detesting democracy at home in America.