Yet what was most striking to me about these summer exchanges was where the blame seemed to land: at the foot of State Department leaders, whom the callers insisted were undermining contingency planning and shirking their legal responsibility—as enumerated by statute and executive order—to protect, and evacuate as necessary, U.S. posts and personnel as well as American citizens abroad. Instead, said one senior official, State was “pressing the DOD easy button”—shorthand for shoveling State’s problems onto the plate of the Department of Defense. This individual described the decision-making process at Foggy Bottom as being plagued by “pathologic optimism.” But as the days and weeks wore on, several other State Department sources would explain that the problem came down to hubris. Eliminating CCR and degrading OpMed, without clearly defined alternatives, was evidence, they said, of meta-ignorance (known in psychology circles as the Dunning-Kruger effect); America’s diplomats, in the view of these insiders, were ignorant of their own ignorance.

And so it would come to pass. “We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit,” President Biden had said when he stepped up to the podium in the White House Treaty Room on April 14, 2021, to announce he was bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan by late summer. “We’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely.” True, the American government, in recent days, has arranged for the emergency evacuation of some 120,000 people, an impressive feat. Moreover, even as ISIS terror attacks claimed the lives of 13 members of the U.S. military and more than 110 Afghan civilians last week, the Biden administration has said it is determined to honor its pledge to extract American forces from an unpopular and devastating conflict. But what happened at the State Department in the months leading up to the fall of Kabul seems to have undermined Biden’s promise back in April. It appears to have involved self-sabotage, bureaucratic infighting, and disjointed planning with, at times, an apparent lack of urgency. This account is based on a review of sensitive memos, emails, texts, calendar entries, audio recordings, situation reports, and intelligence threat summaries—as well as interviews with 16 current and former officials who had a ringside seat to the internecine battles that marred the end of America’s longest war.