The forced withdrawal from Afghanistan ranks among the most humiliating episodes in all of America’s 400-year history, for it symbolizes in dramatic fashion the end of a horrendously destructive failed crusade to export American-style democracy by arrogant policymakers transfixed by their own country’s raw military power.

It is depressing, to say the least, but we failed in Afghanistan for many of the same reasons we stumbled in Vietnam, almost 50 years ago.

At the outset of each conflict, U.S. policymakers were woefully ignorant of the political and cultural dynamics of the nation they aimed to transform. And so, to a greater degree than is usually realized, the United States went into both conflicts half-blind, convinced that the righteousness of the cause would compensate for ignorance, and ensure success.

The Johnson administration made the absurd assumption that deep in the heart of every Vietnamese there was an American yearning to be born. George W. Bush and his advisers made the same assumption about the Afghan people. Time proved the utter bankruptcy of this assumption in both cases, as well several others, including the idea that the United States possessed the wisdom and wherewithal to crush a well-organized insurgency while it simultaneously built an entirely new government apparatus.