None of this is to say that the West should have stayed. Far from it. Rather, it demonstrates – in brutal, bloody detail – that you cannot create a viable, liberal democratic state at the end of a gun. A civil society cannot emerge merely because Western NGOs will it into being. Afghans are as deserving of freedom and democracy as anyone else. But such a society must be carved out from the bottom up. It cannot be imposed from above. Rights and freedoms cannot rely on permanent war and foreign occupation.

But the manner in which the West has left has made an already terrible situation even worse. We have abandoned many of those who took us at their word. That we failed to get Western nationals and Afghan allies out before the nation fell is a blunder of unparalleled proportions. Meanwhile, the ‘war on terror’ as we knew it has finished with jihadists emboldened the world over. The Afghan intervention, like all the other interventions that followed it, has achieved nothing other than bloodshed and chaos – more of which is no doubt still to come.